Onondaga County ratchets up pressure on 91-year-old widow to leave home on Micron site

Syracuse, N.Y. – Onondaga County is putting new pressure on a 91-year-old Clay widow to vacate the house where the county promised she could live the rest of her life.

To make way for Micron Technology’s chipmaking complex, the Onondaga County Industrial Development Agency is now starting a court action against Azalia King called eminent domain.

This follows the order of eviction the county served on King in September.

Both actions are designed to void an agreement the county signed 20 years ago that allowed Azalia King and her husband, Glenn, to live out the rest of their lives in the house on Caughdenoy Road.

King’s son, Terry King, said the family will fight the county in court if necessary.

“Twenty years ago, threatened with the use of eminent domain if they did not accept, the King family reached an agreement with OCIDA where an essential component of the deal was lifetime usage of their home,” Terry King wrote in a statement to syracuse.com. “OCIDA and Ryan McMahon are now seeking to back out of a deal, in place for 20 years, simply because they no longer like its terms.”

Terry King said the family didn’t know about the eminent domain proceeding until contacted by syracuse.com on Monday.

OCIDA bought the house from the Kings in 2005 after seven years of negotiation. The county signed a written agreement then that promised the Kings could stay in the house where they had raised their six children “until the death of the last to survive of Glenn King and Azalia King.”

Glenn, who served the Clay volunteer fire department for 70 years, died in 2015. Azalia, 91, is still alive. She has lived in the house for 60 years.

OCIDA has been pressuring Azalia King for months as the Micron project has picked up momentum. Micron plans to start clearing land in December, even though the company revealed last week that opening of the two factories has been delayed by two to three years.

The house where King lives sits in the path of the first phase of Micron’s clearing and leveling.

On Sunday, OCIDA published a notice in The Post-Standard saying it would hold a public hearing to launch the eminent domain proceeding against King. The notice is required by law.

The hearing will begin at 9 a.m. Nov. 20 at the Clay Town Hall.

The hearing is the first step in the process, which allows public agencies to seize land and then evict tenants or homeowners to make way for developments deemed beneficial to the public.

In this case, the county is using eminent domain essentially to break its contract with the Kings.

The public hearing will be held on a weekday, when much of the public is at work.

The public can also submit written comments by 5 p.m. on the day of the hearing, Nov. 20. Comments should be sent to: Robert M. Petrovich, Executive Director, Onondaga County Industrial Development Agency, 335 Montgomery Street, Floor 2M, Syracuse, NY 13202.

After that hearing, the agency would go to court to ask a judge to order King out of the house. Under the law, OCIDA would have to pay relocation expenses.

The eviction notice served on King in September and the formal eminent domain process starting next week are “parallel paths” to get King out of the house, said Justin Sayles, communications director for County Executive Ryan McMahon.

Sayles said the county continues to negotiate with King.

Terry King said this isn’t about money or Micron.

“Rather, it is the simple expectation that OCIDA would honor the terms of the agreement that it struck,” he wrote.

OCIDA and King’s six children have been negotiating for months. The agency initially offered King just $5,000 to move, an offer her children rejected as insultingly low. OCIDA upped the offer to $100,000, and the family countered with a proposal to have OCIDA buy a separate piece of land Azalia King owns across the road.

Months passed before OCIDA served King with an eviction notice on Sept. 4. The notice, signed by agency Executive Director Robert Petrovich, ordered King to move by Jan. 16.

As Micron prepares to start work, the county decided not to wait until January and to launch the eminent domain process instead.

OCIDA bought the Kings’ 47-acre farm for $330,750 in July 2005 and took possession of the land. The written agreement with the Kings said they had to maintain the house and pay all utilities but didn’t have to pay property taxes.

County officials have recently tried to backpedal on the terms of the lifetime use agreement signed with the Kings. In March, Micron submitted a draft environmental report to OCIDA saying that the lone remaining family on Caughdenoy Road “has life-long access rights to the property’s single family house.”

OCIDA released its own version of the report in June that altered Micron’s wording to “license agreement” and made no mention of King’s lifetime rights.

The reports did not name King, but she is the only person living on Caughdenoy Road in a house owned by OCIDA.

At the Nov. 20 public hearing, OCIDA will also start eminent domain proceedings against a company called SSO Holdings. OCIDA plans to seize the right of way on about 2,000 feet of land off Henry Clay Boulevard in Clay. Micron says it needs to bury pipes along that strip of land to convey contaminated wastewater about 2 miles from the chipmaking plants to a proposed treatment plant next to the Oak Orchard Wastewater Treatment plant.

The Micron project, if fully built over 20 years, would be the largest private development in New York state history and a critical step in U.S. efforts to become less dependent upon overseas factories to produce chips vital to the military and modern life.

OCIDA last week accepted the final environmental impact report for the Micron project. On Monday, the agency is scheduled to release its decision on whether Micron can proceed with the project and what steps the company must take to minimize environmental harm.