Severing family roots: Family plans to battle Armona Community Services District to keep 4-generation land

ARMONA - To Peter Davidson, three walnut trees his family have preserved in the middle of plowed fields say it all.

"Yeah, you can go ahead and till all around us, but we're going to stay here," Davidson said, looking out on a 20-acre farm in northwest Armona that has been in his family for four generations.

"That's your roots. That defines who you are, in a sense," he said.

The prospect of losing those roots to the Armona Community Services District through eminent domain sent the U.S. Air Force colonel hustling from Ramstein Air Base in Germany to protest at a jam-packed public hearing held Wednesday night in this community of 1,100 homes.

The district had planned to cover the Davidsons' farm with evaporation ponds as part of a project to remove arsenic from tainted drinking water in Well No. 2, which is right next to the property.

After an uproar from the Davidson family and sympathetic comments from much of the audience, the board voted to reconsider.

The farm is intact - for now.

Peter Davidson, his wife Lisa Davidson and his parents Franklin and Polly Davidson have no plans to give up the land. The four co-owners don't currently live on the property but say they all intend to move there after Peter Davidson retires from the Air Force.

From the air, the Davidson plot is a rectangle stretching northward from Locust Street across Last Chance Ditch.

Immediately to the west is Armona Union Academy, a private K-12 school associated with the Seventh-day Adventist church.

A whitewashed, two-story farmhouse fronting Locust Street has been the focal point of the family's history since 1917, when Uberta Wright Davidson, Peter Davidson's great-grandfather, bought the property and moved into the house with his wife, Lucy.

When Uberta Wright Davidson died around 1940, the peach orchard he managed was passed to his son, Paul Davidson, the second generation to live on the farm. With his wife, Ruth, Paul Davidson planted cotton and some alfalfa on the property.

Franklin Davidson, Paul's son and representing the third generation, grew up in the two-story house.

He and his wife currently live in Conroe, Texas, waiting for their son Peter to retire from the Air Force before moving back to the property.

In an interview Friday in the home's kitchen, 73-year-old Franklin Davidson recalled watching the hanging light fixtures sway during earthquakes as he grew up there.

Franklin's life trajectory took him from a childhood in Armona to the University of Arizona, where he was a research associate until 1978.

The farm was leased to another farmer who kept it in production. The land is now leased and farmed by Steve Bickner.

But Franklin Davidson said he and his wife, Polly, always had the intention of returning to the Armona acreage.

"It was just in my life. This is home," he said.

Peter Davidson, who remembers his grandfather teaching him how to farm the land as a kid, wants to handbuild his own home on the property and till the soil himself after leaving the Air Force.

Davidson said he has no alternative in mind and will sue the district if it proceeds with plans to seize the property through eminent domain.

The legal process gives public agencies the right to take private property for public use as long the owner is given fair market value.

If the matter ends up in court, the district will win, according to Mark Mlikotin, president of the California Alliance to Protect Private Property Rights.

"At the end of the day ... (Davidson) will lose his property, because it's a public agency seizing the land for public benefit," Mlikotin said.

Mlikotin said it is "easy" for a public agency to take agricultural land because it's "much cheaper" than commercial or residential property.

Mlikotin said that in "99 percent" of the cases he's seen in which a government body has abandoned eminent domain proceedings, it has been because of political pressure rather than legal action.

"When it comes to a public agency's ability to seize private property, their power is absolute," he said.

The reporter can be reached at 582-0471, ext. 3061.

(Dec. 18, 2006)