Hi! Welcome to the Small Business Trends radio show. I'm your host, Anita Campbell. And I am positively delighted you could join us today. The title of today's show is "Who's Taking Your Property?" The disturbing trend involving eminent domain. And today we have two excellent guests with us to discuss a timely and important issue, that disturbing trend for any individual or business that owns real estate in the US. And the trend involves local governments and communities, using, some would say abusing, the power of eminent domain to seize private properties so that it can be used for commercial development purposes. Andrew Langer of the National Federation of Independent Businesses, or the NFIB as it's called, will be joining us in just a few minutes. Andrew is going to explain this issue, what it means to small businesses, and what's being done about it. And then a little later in the show, at the half hour, we're going to be joined by Nancy Kerville, a small business owner from East Lansing, Michigan. She's going to share a story of how one city is using the power of eminent domain, and how it's affecting her business.

Now, normally at this time we do a segment called Today's Trend where we highlight briefly a trend impacting the small business market. Today, however, I am not going to do the Today's Trend segment because we have so much information to go over. This is a really important issue and I want to make sure we get right to the information. And for that same reason, we won't be accepting calls today unless, and until, at the very end, after we have gotten through our guests and the information.

So with that, I would like to welcome our featured guest, Andrew Langer to the show. Andrew.

Hello, Anita. It's great to be here. I'm real happy to be here on Small Business Trends.

Well super. Now Andrew is the manager of regulatory policy for the NFIB, and he's leading the charge to educate small businesses about this threat from eminent domain laws, that are sometimes misused. And he's also helping organize efforts to deal with it. So it's great to have you here, Andrew, and I know we've got a lot of information to explain about this...
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