Florida town’s $30K fine for too-long grass proves – Latest News
It’s lastly spring. Better mow your garden.
If you don’t, your city authorities might fine you hundreds of {dollars} a day.
Worse, for those who can’t pay the fine, they could confiscate your home.
Six years in the past, in Dunedin, Fla., Jim Ficken let his grass grow.
His mother had died, and he’d left city to take care of her property. He requested a buddy to cut his grass, however that buddy died, too!
A Dunedin, Florida home-owner was fined $30,000 for tall grass, which led to a lawsuit in 2019, in line with stories. Mikhailov Studio – stock.adobe.com
In the 2 months Ficken was away, his grass grew taller than 10 inches.
City bureaucrats began fining him. But they didn’t inform Ficken that.
When he lastly received back, there was no discover of the $500-a-day fine. Only when he bumped into a “code enforcement officer” did he study he’d be getting “a big bill.”
When the invoice got here, it was for $24,454.
Ficken rapidly mowed his garden. Then, the town tacked on one other $5,000 for “non-compliance.”
Ficken didn’t have that a lot money, so metropolis officers advised him they might take his home.
Fortunately, Ficken found the libertarian law firm, the Institute for Justice, which fights authorities abuse.
IJ lawyer Ari Bargil took on Ficken’s case, arguing that the $30,000 fine violates the Constitution’s limits on “excessive bail, fines, and cruel punishments.”
But a choose ruled that the fine was “not excessive.”
Of course, judges are simply legal professionals with robes. Often, they’re lawyer/bureaucrats who’ve turn out to be very snug with massive authorities.
I call a $30K penalty for not reducing your garden absurdly extreme.
IJ legal professional Bargil advised native information stations, “If $30,000 for tall grass in Florida is not excessive, it is hard to imagine what is.”
Dunedin’s politicians typically impose heavy fines for minor transgressions.
One resident advised us, “They fined me $32,000 for a hole the size of a quarter in my stucco . . . For a lawn mower in my yard . . . They fine people they can pick on… and they keep picking on them.”
It occurs elsewhere, too.
Charlotte, NC, fined a church for “excessive pruning.”
Danbury, Conn., charged a resident $200,000 for leaving his yard messy.
Bargil notes, “It’s pretty apparent that code enforcement is a major cash cow.”
In simply 5½ years, Dunedin collected $3.6 million in fines.
But by then, I and others had seen. We had been reporting on Dunedin’s heavy fines.
So did the politicians sheepishly acknowledge that they’d milked residents with extreme fines and provides the money back?
Of course not. They employed a PR firm.
That value taxpayers one other $25,000 a month.
Politicians care largely about themselves.
After The Institute for Justice filed a second lawsuit, Dunedin agreed that Ficken may pay much less: $10,000.
Still an excessive amount of, however Ficken agreed.
“Our Founders,” says Bargil, “recognized that the ability to fine is the ability to cripple. It’s one of the ways, other than incarceration, that government can really oppress.”
Government routinely oppresses. For six long years, Dunedin’s politicians oppressed Jim Ficken.
John Stossel is the creator of “Give Me a Break: How I Exposed Hucksters, Cheats, and Scam Artists and Became the Scourge of the Liberal Media.”
