Somerville will, in fact, need to pay $28 million to the prior owners of a Washington Street property it seized in 2019, according to a recent court decision, which affirmed an earlier ruling that the city drastically underpaid for the land when it took control of it against the owners’ wishes.
The Wednesday decision from the Massachusetts Appeals Court came after a lower court found the four-acre parcel was worth $35.3 million, a sum substantially larger than the roughly $8.8 million the Somerville Redevelopment Authority paid for it.
George McLaughlin, the former property owners’ attorney, said they “feel vindicated” during a Sunday interview.
“This has been a long and emotional battle for my clients,” McLaughlin said. “They wanted to develop this property, and had an opportunity where they would have made a lot of money, but it was unnecessarily taken from them by Somerville, and Somerville paid them a fraction of what it was worth.”
The city had appealed the lower court’s ruling, arguing that the jury had been swayed inappropriately by remarks McLaughlin made at trial.
The city has another chance to appeal the decision, this time to the Supreme Judicial Court. A spokesperson did not indicate whether the city plans to do so, saying on Sunday that its law department was still reviewing the decision.
The dispute dates back to 2019 when the city took the four-acre property at 90 Washington Street by eminent domain, a legal measure that allows municipalities to take over private land. The land was home to a shuttered strip mall called Cobble Hill Plaza that was owned by three families, who said through their lawyer they were planning to sell the land to developers.
The families first argued their land was improperly taken and filed a suit against the city in 2019. They lost that case in 2021 when the Supreme Judicial Court ruled Somerville had the authority to seize their land.
But that wasn’t the end of it. The former owners also argued in another lawsuit that the property was worth more than the city had paid for it, noting the high price a nearby property sold for. They won that case last year, with a jury determining Somerville should pay the families the property value difference of roughly $26.5 million, plus about $1.4 million in interest.
The city appealed, saying it was not given a fair trial because remarks made by McLaughlin, the former owners’ lawyer, were inappropriate and improperly swayed the jury’s decision.
During the trial’s closing remarks last year, McLaughlin asked jurors to consider how they themselves had been treated by the government in the past.
“What’s your common experience about how the government treats its citizens? Are they fair? Are they unfair?” he asked, according to court documents.
The city argued in its appeal those, and some other statements in his closing argument, were not appropriate questions to ask. The Appeals Court justices found, among other things, that the lower court’s judge resolved any issues by telling jurors to disregard what McLaughlin had said.
McLaughlin acknowledged his comments at the time were “a little over the edge” in Sunday’s interview with the Globe. He said he agreed with the judge’s decision to tell jurors not to take them into account and believed it had no impact on the final verdict.
The Somerville Redevelopment Authority has said it planned to use the land as the site of a new public safety building with space for the city’s fire and police departments. It also solicited input from residents about other uses for the parcel, which is a short walk from the new East Somerville MBTA station on the Green Line Extension, including commercial and residential development. The city’s spokesperson declined to comment on whether the recent court decision will impact those plans.
Spencer Buell can be reached at spencer.buell@globe.com. Follow him @SpencerBuell.
