Short answer. No. The rule states that no counterclaim, cross-claim or third-party complaint shall be alleged or allowed in the answer or any subsequent pleading. Your answer is confined to identifying the property, stating the interest you claim in it, and setting out your objections to the taking.
What the law says
No counterclaim, cross-claim or third-party complaint shall be alleged or allowed in the answer or any subsequent pleading.
Rule 67, Section 3 — Defenses and objections. Read the full provision →
The prohibition is flat, and it covers three things
The rule does not merely discourage these pleadings; it says they shall not be alleged or allowed. And it names three distinct devices: a counterclaim against the plaintiff, a cross-claim against a co-defendant, and a third-party complaint bringing in someone new. Nor is the ban confined to the answer — the rule extends it to any subsequent pleading, which forecloses the obvious workaround of raising the claim later in the case.
What the answer is actually for
The rule tells you what belongs there instead. The answer must specifically designate or identify the property in which you claim an interest, state the nature and extent of the interest claimed, and adduce all your objections and defenses to the taking. That is the scope of the pleading. An expropriation case is built to decide two questions — whether the property may be taken, and what must be paid for it — and the pleading rules keep it to those.
Why unrelated claims are kept out
A landowner facing expropriation often has other grievances against the agency involved, and it feels efficient to bring them all at once. The design here runs the other way. Expropriation proceedings determine whether property passes and at what price; letting in every collateral dispute between the owner and the government would slow the case and entangle the compensation question with matters that have nothing to do with the property's value. The same section reinforces that focus elsewhere, requiring the answer to state the nature and extent of the interest claimed and to adduce all objections and defenses to the taking, and treating anything left out as waived.
This is not the same as losing the claim
The rule bars the claim from this pleading and this case. It does not say your grievance is extinguished, and it is a mistake to read a pleading restriction as a decision on the merits of a claim it never allowed to be heard. Whether a separate remedy exists, and how it would have to be pursued, depends entirely on what the claim is. Raise it with a lawyer as its own matter rather than trying to fit it into the expropriation answer, where the rule will not let it stay.