With unemployment through the roof in Rhode Island, it makes no sense for Providence to threaten companies that employ thousands of people and pump hundreds of millions of dollars into the economy. Yet that, incredibly, seems to be what the city is doing, in identifying blue-collar businesses in the working port area along Allens Avenue as potential targets for eminent-domain seizures, apparently for the benefit of developers of waterfront property. The developments, with their service-sector jobs such as maids and waiters, are unlikely to pay anywhere near as well as working-port jobs.

An ordinance just introduced before the City Council would authorize the Providence Redevelopment Authority to begin condemnation and eminent-domain procedures against businesses in a 590-acre area, which the ordinance declares “blighted and substandard.”

That is vastly bigger than the 90 acres that New London grabbed for the benefit of private development (subject of the Supreme Court’s Kelo ruling that local government may seize land from one private owner and give it to another private owner to, the city asserted, help fill its tax coffers). The Pfizer pharmaceutical company paid New London a total of $4 for the property, before recently announcing it will shut down its research facility, taking away 1,400 jobs and leaving behind an office-park wasteland.

Allens Avenue business owners are determined to avoid the same fate. They fired off a letter to Mayor Cicilline, insisting that the plan “is an affront to basic private property rights and an insult to successful area businesses. . . . We are not ‘blighted and substandard,’ and we will not accept this designation.”

This is not the first time that the city, still apparently in love with the chimera of condos, has attacked this working port. In 2005, it tried to grab a parcel of land bought by Promet Marine Services Co. The fight went all the way to the state Supreme Court, which told Providence to give it back. “The record is devoid of any document reflecting a finding that the property is blighted or substandard. Indeed, there is no dispute that Promet operates a profitable business at that location,” the court ruled.

An official designation that the port area is “blighted and substandard” might well legalize such unjust seizures.

As the business owners note, the designation alone would strangle job growth. “Facing the threat of eminent domain for the next 40 years, no area businesses will have the incentive to invest in their properties to expand operations and grow jobs.”

But this is not just about precious jobs. As recently as Nov. 10, the U.S. Department of Energy warned Governor Carcieri and Mayor Cicilline that the city’s attempts to turn a working port into a “mixed-use” area with hotels, marinas, condos, etc., could threaten Providence’s essential petroleum-storage terminals, which serve much of southern New England.

We are mystified by the city’s lack of concern fo tax-paying businesses and the region’s energy security.

Those who care about Rhode Island’s economic prospects and the message being sent to businesses that create high-paying jobs here should push Providence away from this disastrous approach. Governor and legislative leaders, please call your office.