Johnston, R.I., follows through on seizure of land by eminent domain, halting 250-unit affordable housing project – The Boston Globe

According to Polisena, the now-previous owners of the property can still fight to have the title returned.

And officials are already facing a legal challenge.

Owners SCLS Realty LLC and Sixty Three Johnston LLC – or family-owned homebuilding firms whose members are Lucille Santoro, Salvatore Compagnone, and Ralph Santoro – filed a lawsuit against the town in US District Court in Providence on March 10.

They argue their constitutional and civil rights have been “threatened by an outrageous abuse of government powers.” The lawsuit describes the seizure of their property as a “sham taking.”

“The town claims it needs to use eminent domain to build a new municipal campus. But this is false,” the court filing states. “The real reason the town is forcibly depriving the Santoro family of its land is to stop the building of over 250 desperately needed affordable homes.”

Despite the lawsuit, Polisena said he will move forward with plans to build new public facilities on the site and noted officials already put out a request for qualifications.

“I’m very confident in our legal argument,” he said in an interview.

Developers initially proposed plans for the 252-unit, low-and-moderate-income housing complex late last year.

Polisena quickly vowed to “use all the power of government that I have to stop it,” and in January, moved to take the property by eminent domain. The mayor said the site would become home to a new Town Hall and a public safety complex, as the town’s police and fire stations are in disrepair.

To fund the new projects, Johnston will also scrap plans to construct a new high school, and will instead return to its original plans to renovate the existing buildling, he said.

In their lawsuit, the Santoro family, through its attorneys, challenges the notion the town took their land for the purpose of constructing the new buildings, arguing that under the law, the town is prohibited from “concealing or colluding to hide its real reasons for taking the Santoro property.”

“Eminent domain cannot be employed to stop property owners from using their land in legal ways, under the guise of a public use or purpose,” the lawsuit states. “Defendants are abusing the eminent domain power to block affordable housing for low-to-moderate-income families, simply because they don’t want that kind of thing in their town.”

Kelley Morris Salvatore, an attorney representing the family, did not immediately return a request for comment on Monday.

Polisena pushed back on the allegations that officials are hiding their true intent. He said he had been looking for a solution for the town’s ailing public safety facilities since after he took office in early 2023, when he succeeded his father, Joseph Polisena Sr., who served as mayor for 16 years.

In January, Polisena said he approached other developers about buying land from them to no avail and only became aware that the property now in question was as large as 31 acres after the developers approached the town with their housing plans in December.

“If I just came up with this municipal complex idea off the top of my head to stop the project, why do I have written correspondence in my email about multiple sites?” Polisena said recently, referring to emails he had from March 2023.

The town even paid to do engineering work on another site, but that property didn’t pan out, he said.

“We said, ‘Let’s put this on the back burner, but we’ll keep it in the back of our mind,’ and then, once this got proposed, like I said, I just put two and two together and said, ‘This could be the spot that we’re looking for,’” he said.

Christopher Gavin can be reached at christopher.gavin@globe.com.