Whether the conversion of land originally condemned for airport purposes to private commercial use violates the constitutional public use requirement under eminent domain principles

QUESTIONS PRESENTED The City and County of Denver condemned 8,360 acres of land from Petitioner Monaghan Farms as part of its land acquisition for the creation of the Denver International Airport, including a large area surrounding the facility to serve as an environmental buffer and safety zone. Thirty-four years later, Denver decided to use approximately half that land (which had not been used for airport purposes) for commercial nonaeronautical developments. But the power of eminent domain may only be used to take property for public use. The Colorado courts exacerbated the situation by assuming that conversion to _ private, commercial, non-aeronautical use was an “airport purpose” as a matter of law, expressly refusing to permit discovery to ascertain the truth or accuracy of that assumption, and then deciding the case as a matter of law without a trial. Question 1: Is it an appropriate application of Kelo v. City of New London, 545 U.S. 469 (2005) to take property for public use (in the sense of actual use by the public) and then later decide to devote that property to private commercial use without reconsidering the constitutional public use requirement? Question 2: When property has been taken by eminent domain for a specific public use (construct and operate an airport), may that property later be devoted to a wholly different, commercial, nonaeronautical development that abandons the prior public use? ii Question 3: Does this Court’s recent decision in Loper Bright (2024) call for re-examining the duty of the judiciary to exercise independent judgment in deciding public use under Kelo? Question 4: When a court decides a case based on a “legal” determination of a central “fact” while denying either discovery or trial on the merits, has it denied due process of law? Question 5: Does it satisfy the Fifth Amendment’s requirements for exercising eminent domain (incorporated through the Fourteenth Amendment against the states) for the sovereign to seize land in fee simple absolute when (1) the condemnation petition did not explicitly seek fee simple absolute title, (2) the condemnor did not pay full fair market value for the fee simple absolute rights to the property that was taken, (8) the property was not used for its intended public purpose, and (4) the property was later devoted to private use?