Lest our mayor and City Council remain under the thrall of Hollywood and the thrill of being commercial land-developers through some members' insistence on putting their fellow Santa Feans $35 million in debt for a Railyard movie theater, let 'em look back East ...

... to New London, Conn., where city leaders condemned homes and other private property so they and some developers could put up a gleaming new "urban village" to be anchored by the mighty Pfizer pharmceutical firm. It would feature a whole new commercial district, replete with restaurants, shops, marinas and other complements to the drug company's research center.

The city's out-with-unfancy-homes, up-with-moneymaking scheme led to legal proceedings that reached (ta-da!) the Supreme Court — where, figured fairness buffs and legal scholars alike, our nation's highest tribunal would declare that you can only take private property for public purposes — roads, courthouses and the like.

Fairness, schmairness, said a 5-4 majority of Supremes; as long as a government sees a public benefit in doing so, it can apply eminent domain 'til the cows come home.

So the development went forward — which brings us to Santa Fe, where the railyard movie-house property didn't have to go through the condemnation process, but where local government, like that of New London, really doesn't belong.

Santa Fe no sooner had bought 50 acres of railyard property from the Santa Fe Railway's development arm than it realized that developing that land was beyond City Hall's competence. So the City Council lateraled the responsibility to nonprofit development operation.

But the city treasury, someone figures, is where the money is — and a California promoter who came in hyping a monster movie complex soon was saying he'd also have to have a bunch of retail stores to go along with it. And while we're at it, he said, let's have City Hall be the owner; I'll be your celebrity tenant.

Wow — what a deal; let's pursue it, said a few blithe councilors to City Manager Galen Buller ...

What we say to the council is let's not be hasty — and that takes us back to New London, from which Pfizer suddenly says it's pulling up stakes in favor of a better deal a few miles down the road in Groton, Conn.

So New London's biggest office complex soon will be vacant. Alongside it lies a strip of barren land that'd been cleared to build new homes, a hotel, condominiums and those stores that looked so nice in the architect-concept drawings ... prompting bittersweet laughter from the folks who lost their homes to the civic sellout.

Might there be similar giggling, somewhere down the road, from the forsaken owner of the Jean Cocteau Theatre, who had hoped to expand his highly popular, but tiny, venue as part of Santa Fe's new Railyard? Perhaps — if the city sticks to its cockamamie notion of competing with our community's other multi-screen cinema-houses, then, to its dismay, discovers fewer and fewer folks going out to movies in this age of films at our fingertips.

Could today's technological realities be a reason that the movie-house promoter would rather not sink his own fortune, if he has one, into the hole in the ground where he wants Santa Fe taxpayers to put a pleasure dome? And if he can't make money on purchased property, why do city leaders think they can?

These aren't the "best of times" — and if they're not the "worst of times," City Hall is certainly having a Dickens of a time financially. Time to put this notion to the guillotine ...