§ 25-2504.Agency; hearing; where held; relocations; notice; hearings.

Section 25-2504 sets the second procedural checkpoint, after the notice required by 25-2503. The agency must hold a public hearing on the proposed project and acquisition at least thirty days before beginning negotiations. Notice of the hearing must be published at least ten days beforehand in a legal newspaper of general circulation in each affected county, or, if no such newspaper exists there, in whatever newspaper the county board has designated as the official legal notice publication.

Where the hearing takes place depends on the project’s scope. An acquisition touching more than one county requires a hearing at each county seat. A countywide acquisition is heard at the county seat. A smaller acquisition is heard somewhere convenient to the property involved, and an acquisition of property located outside Nebraska is heard at the agency’s principal office. At the hearing, the agency must explain the project’s nature and necessity, why it chose this location or route, each owner’s right to counsel and to negotiate or reject the compensation offered, and the right to have damages determined through the eminent domain process. The agency must hear and consider objections from anyone who raises them.

The section closes with a safeguard against a project drifting away from what owners were told. If the agency relocates the project after the hearing, and the relocation would bring in more than ten additional owners of separately owned tracts who had not previously received notice, the agency must give those owners the notice described in 25-2503 and hold a new hearing limited to the relocated part of the project. The forty-five-day and thirty-day timing rules in 25-2503 and this section do not apply to that follow-up notice, hearing, or negotiation.