The Impact of Condemnation Cases on the Right of Way Acquisition Duration in Mississippi

Acquiring the Right of Way (ROW) in a timely manner is often the key element in moving a highway construction project forward. Delay in the ROW acquisition process can lead to major delays to the construction phase. Quantifying the delay factors will allow targeted improvements to speed the acquisition process. Thirty-five projects, with 1478 parcels, acquired by the Mississippi Department of Transportation (MDOT) were randomly selected for analysis to evaluate factors affecting acquisition duration as identified by a survey of practitioners. The data were analyzed using Statistica7 software to gain understanding of the dataset and to test the Null Hypothesis (Ho, meaning the variable does not affect the result) significance and standard multi regression analysis to identify the factors that contributed to acquisition duration delay. The identified delay factors were used to develop a new “Acquisition Agreement Form” process to reduce condemnation cases. This process was tested and validated on an active project that contained 32 parcels with 10 (31%) parcels recommended for condemnation. Using this new process, only one (3%) out of the 10 parcels was condemned and the other 9 parcels (28%) were prevented from condemnation using this new process. This new process reduced the ROW acquisition duration and enhanced the overall acquisition process. Thus, any DOT ROW division interested in reducing condemnation cases can adopt this new process.