Let's talk about zoning!
I can't be the only one that is interested in this subject, right?
posted by J. Kendrick McPeters | 1:52 AM
Giles Free Speech Zone
The purpose of the "Giles Free Speech Zone" is to identify problems of concern to the people of Giles County, to discuss them in a gentlemanly and civil manner, while referring to the facts and giving evidence to back up whatever claims are made, making logical arguments that avoid any use of fallacy, and, hopefully, to come together in agreement, and find a positive solution to the problem at hand. Help make a difference! Email "mcpeters@usit.net" to suggest topics or make private comments.
7 Comments:
Would you believe it !!!!!
Giles County does have an active zoning law on its books. Enacted in March 1999 the County Commission headed by Mr. Wakefield and supported by Flacy, Harris, Jackson, Beets, Risner, Holt, Howell, Worsham, and Tommy Campbell voted for the Floodplain Zoning Resolution #99-12A.
This law requires any and all citizens who wish to build anything (costing more than $5,000.00) to acquire a building permit under penality of law.
Yes, I believe it. I also believe that this zoning plan was most likely passed under "cover of darkness" -- that is, without the legally required public notice and meeting.
Call me cynical, but I've come to expect the worst, when it comes to the County Commission and zoning.
But at least this (probably illegally passed) zoning plan has the merit that some people -- those who live in federally defined flood zones -- get to buy flood insurance, while the rest of us are probably not affected. (I'd have to read the actual plan to get more definitive than "probably.")
Thanks for contributing, anonymous. Next time, please consider posting under a handle.
Here's one of my zoning posts to the old blog:
Anonymous #1 said:
As for being a coward, I was very vocal against what you have been trying to do. Hardly a coward.
Well, if you aren't a coward, why are you keeping your identity a secret? If you really have the courage of your own convictions, then why aren't you putting a name to your postings? It's not like the KGB is gonna come and get you in the middle of the night, to arrest you for your unpopular opinions. In America, we have the right to express ourselves freely. And only cowards take that freedom, and use it anonymously. IMHO, anyway...
And as for 78% who oppose zoning, could it be because of those like you who continually stir up trouble in the name of concern for our property rights?
I'm stirring up trouble??? Mister Anonymous, I'm not the one who zoned out churches, schools and good paying jobs! I'm not the one who illegally passed a rotten zoning plan shot through with typos and catch-22s! How can I make trouble? By telling the public the TRUTH about what the pro-zoners have been doing?
As far as "stirring up trouble", that's a two way street. Your side has the Lake "News We Want To Print" Empire on it's side, as well as the local Good Ole Boy Network of politcians and cronies, AND the local school system (which, twelve years ago, was terrorizing the kids into believing that, without zoning, we'd all get cancer and die). You want to explain to me why, if my arguments are so flimsy, your side -- with all its advantages -- can't manage to persuade the majority of the public to support zoning?
Practically everytime I try to get my message out, I have to go begging my supporters for money, and then buy an ad in the newspaper, or on the radio. Roger Reedy, on the other hand, was given essentially unlimited (and free) newspaper column inches and radio air time, and he used it to propagandize for his zoning plan. Believe me, if the playing field was level, the number of people opposing zoning would be much higher!
You know why people believe my side of the story? It's not just because they respect property rights. Rather, it's because they have a low opinion of local politicians, and don't want to empower them to have any more control over them, than they already have. In many cases, the most outspoken anti-zoners have lived in places with zoning, and know from first hand experience that zoning is not something they want or need.
Here's a fairly lengthy article, published by the Future of Freedom Foundation, that explains precisely why most people with any knowledge of zoning, don't want to be zoned:
Zoning: The New Tyranny
by James Bovard, August 1996
Modern zoning laws presume that no citizen has a right to control his own land and that every citizen has a right to control his neighbor's land. Zoning laws have become far more invasive and restrictive in recent years. If you want to use your own land, increasingly you have to beg, bribe, and grovel to the nearest government bureaucrat. Local zoning officials are increasingly petty dictators, ruling and ruining the lives of average citizens.
Flosmoor, Illinois, in an act of legislative snobbery, banned pickup trucks from its streets — and even from private driveways. Coral Gables, Florida, charges residents $35 to get a permit to paint the bathroom in their home — or the living room, or any other room. Local building inspectors patrol the streets looking for painting trucks parked at homes that have not paid the permit fee.
Los Angeles prohibits freelance writers from working out of their homes in residential neighborhoods, fearing that the tap-tap-tap of their keyboards could devastate the quality of life in their neighborhoods.
Similarly, Chicago issued a cease-and-desist order to a couple using two personal computers in their home to write software and magazine articles. Virtually all of the city's 200,000 home-based businesses or offices are in violation of the city's zoning code. The city government recently proposed a new home-office zoning code that would have required homeowners to pay hefty licensure fees each year and restrict the home office to no more than 10 percent of the home's floor space — thereby creating a pretext for bureaucrats with measuring tapes to invade thousands of homes.
Guilford, Connecticut, bans takeout windows at any restaurant or food-service place within town limits. (The town does permit takeout service from within restaurants, a practice which does not so severely tarnish the town's dignity.) Pasadena, California, banned residents from having weeds in their yards, a policy sometimes referred to as "crabgrass fascism."
Eleven states currently allow zoning restrictions — i.e., denials of permission to use one's own property — based on aesthetic criteria alone. Salinas, California, bureaucrats came up with the perfect grant of power to themselves over home designs: "Control the amount of variety in housing types and designs to avoid both monotony and visual chaos." With the type of "creativity" consistently favored by government arts agencies, one can only shudder at the notion of giving government employees dictatorial power over home design.
Carol Stream, Illinois, rigorously polices the roofs, windows, home colors, and building materials of homes to insure that they are not too similar or too dissimilar to their neighbors. Since the standards are almost completely vague, the local bureaucrats are left with nearly unlimited power over homeowners and builders — and the result can be "spot zoning," or bureaucrats making up specific rules for every person with a plot of land and an appeal for a permit.
Zoning routinely sacrifices some people's freedom to inflate other people's property values. In Takoma Park, Maryland (a suburb of Washington, D.C.), up to a thousand renters (eight percent of the city's population) were evicted in 1988, primarily to boost the property values of a minority of homeowners. The county government launched a crackdown under a 65-year-old, archaic zoning law that prohibited subletting of apartments — an absurd rule for Takoma Park's large Victorian homes. The crackdown was denounced as "a scheme of social engineering for removal of lower income tenants." At least one of the displaced tenants moved from his apartment into his ten-year-old car.
Connecticut bureaucrats issued a $1,500 citation to John Fraenza of Branford, Connecticut, after he scattered grass seed on his backyard. The bureaucrats claimed that the grass seed somehow disturbed a government-designated "wetland." But if the land had really been that wet, the seeds would have vanished without a trace and no controversy would have occurred.
Local governments have invoked zoning codes to require builders of apartment buildings to install whirlpool tubs and special electric ranges (in one case identified by brand name).
Boston bureaucrats, invoking historic preservation regulations, banned a Catholic church from altering the lighting, windows, paint scheme, doors, finishes, and a painting of the Assumption of Mary inside the church. The bureaucrats decreed that the interior of the church "has major aesthetic importance independence of its religious symbolism" — and thus that they themselves were justified in proclaiming themselves pope.
A 1991 zoning ordinance allows the city of Camarillo, California, "to abate any problem that diminishes property values," as The Los Angeles Times reported. Camarillo City Manager William Little explained: "It's broad enough to cover virtually anything. But we are very judicious in what we go up against." Little's remark exemplifies how zoning to protect property values gives government officials almost unlimited power to restrict the use of property — thereby defeating the whole notion of property rights.
While many people conceive of zoning as government simply preventing sharply conflicting land uses, such as building an ammunitions plant next to an apartment complex, zoning has become far more invasive and arbitrary in recent years. Nowadays, we have constantly changing opinions on architectural correctness, enforced with the iron fist of local government. And for those who violate the planners' latest fashion, the police, or the bulldozer is the ultimate fate.
The essence of zoning is the shotgun behind the door — the pending call on police to drag someone away in handcuffs and bulldoze their home. Zoning is not simply a question of bureaucrats and local politicians coming up with Byzantine ordinances — but of the full force of government waiting to fall on the head of anyone who violates one of the constantly changing local land-use decrees.
In Skanesteles, New York, the local government responded to one couple's zoning violations by sending in sheriff's deputies to drag out and jail the owner's wife and raze their $350,000 lakefront home.
The Office of Code Enforcement in Alexandria, Virginia, sent certified letters to twenty-two homeowners in June 1993 threatening to condemn their properties unless they fixed chipping paint on their windowsills or door frames.
A Princeton, New Jersey, storeowner was threatened with a 90-day jail sentence in 1993 for the crime of having a few barbecue grills lined up in front of his hardware store. Though Irving Urken had put the grills and other goods outside his store for 57 years, a new zoning ordinance banned anything in front of the store — except books, flowers, plants, vegetables, and newspapers.
East Hampton, Long Island, issued a warrant for the arrest of a food-shop owner guilty of an unauthorized exhibition of large orange gourds. Jerry Della Femina, the co-owner of a local market, had a few dozen pumpkins stacked in front of his store. Village bureaucrats ruled that the pumpkins were the equivalent of a sign advertising the sale of pumpkins, and thus the owner needed a sign permit. The shop was in a historic district, and government officials may have thought that similar markets in East Hampton in the 19th century never placed pumpkins in front of their stores.
In September 1993, the New York City buildings commissioner bushwhacked Fordham University. Fordham had received permission from the city government to build a 480-foot radio tower at its campus in the Bronx. After the radio tower was almost half finished, the city government reversed its position and revoked the building permit. The government's action cost Fordham over half-a-million dollars.
Planning bureaucrats, like the pettifoggers that they actually are, consider their petty edicts to be above challenge. Newtown Borough, Pennsylvania, requires citizens to pay a $10,000 nonrefundable fee in order to challenge the constitutionality of the local zoning ordinance.
Government abuses of zoning laws were clearly foreseen back in 1926 by Supreme Court Justice Willis Van Devanter. In his dissent to the Euclid vs. City of Ambler decision — the case that opened the floodgates to zoning — Van Devanter wrote: "The plain truth is that the true object of the ordinance in question is to place all property in a strait-jacket. The purpose to be accomplished is really to regulate the mode of living of persons who may hereafter inhabit [the community]." A brief in that case declared: "That our cities should be made beautiful and orderly is, of course, in the highest degree desirable, but it is even more important that our people should remain free."
James Bovard is the author of Shakedown (Viking Press, 1995) and Lost Rights: The Destruction of American Liberty (St. Martin's Press, 1994).
And, here's another:
Anonymous #2 said:
Sorry, jkm, but I have already seen what trusting my so-called "neighbor" can do for me...as well as other property owners.
Yet, you apparently haven't seen what trusting in politicians has led to in the places that have zoning? (Please read the Jim Bovard article in my reply above.) If you Google "zoning + graft" you get 67,800 hits! Google "zoning + bribe" and you get 99,400 hits!! Google "zoning + corruption" and you get a whopping 685,000 hits!!! Trust in politicians? I think not.
But does that mean that you have to trust 100% in your neighbors? No, you can always refuse to buy land in neighborhoods that aren't protected by deed restrictions. You can always start a community association to install covenants after the fact. And, of course, you can always buy a piece of land slightly larger than you need, and plant fast growing buffer trees at the property lines, thus preserving your view no matter what locates next door. You really aren't helpless and unable to do anything, should Big Daddy government refuse to shackle you with zoning.
Again, would you feel as passionately about this issue if you were negatively affected by some business moving in right beside you and destroying your property value and the freedoms you enjoy????
First of all, I probably would take care to avoid the situation, by buying land that's under deed restriction. But suppose that I didn't, and something horrible threatened to move in next door. If you are asking me, would I then support a euclidian zoning plan that was illegally passed, and was so poorly written that it was unenforceable, and thus provided no protection whatsoever... the answer would have to remain "no."
But there's more than one way to skin a cat. While I couldn't and wouldn't support the present LUMP (of excrement), I would quite happily endorse a pure performance based zoning plan, provided that (1) it only zoned out true nuisances -- and not churches and private schools -- (2) it included tradable protection rights, and (3) required a public referendum to make any changes in the zoning law.
If, for some reason, the above was not attainable, then I'd push for strict enforcement of the nuisance law. Lest you think this law is weak, check out what it's done for Nashville:
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In just a few months, police and city officials closed more than three dozen massage parlors and sexually oriented businesses they say were fronts for prostitution.
Nashville police stopped relying on periodic raids that resulted in prostitution arrests but failed to permanently close the parlors.
Instead, they began using the state's nuisance statute, which prohibits prostitution, to close the businesses.
"I think their mindset changed," Davidson County District Attorney Torry Johnson said of Nashville police. "They started thinking more in terms of not what we can do in a night, but what we could do if we put all this together and work on it."
Police paid confidential informants to secretly record female workers agreeing to sex for money inside the businesses.
After two or three transactions, police used a search warrant to seize money and business records and arrest the parlor's owners and workers. Inspectors and fire marshals worked with police, documenting fire safety or code violations, such as allowing workers to live in the parlors.
Police then presented their findings to a judge and requested that the building be closed until a court hearing. "They fanned out and literally padlocked all of these places in one fell swoop," Johnson said. "The beauty of that is that once you've done that, you've basically put them out of business. There's no income stream."
Police and city officials became so adept at using the nuisance law that it sometimes took them just a few days, or even less time, to close the businesses.
"There were `For Lease' signs all over the place," Johnson said.
Those massage parlors that challenged officials in court had to prove the police were wrong or concede the charges and "sign an agreement that there would be no more sexually oriented or massage-type business there," Forrest said. If the business violated that agreement, the owner could be held in contempt and jailed.
Police say illegitimate massage parlors now are extinct in Nashville.
http://www.courier-journal.com/cjextra/2004projects/massage/stories/p4_strategies.html
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Finally, supposing that none of the above panned out, I'd beg the County Commission to use their power of eminent domain, and condemn and seize the property that was harboring the nuisance. Assuming they bought the property, they could write restrictions into the deed, and put it back on the market, secure in the knowledge that nobody would ever use it for ill purposes.
Zoning -- especially euclidian zoning -- is not the only arrow in the County Commission's quiver. It just happens to be the "arrow of choice" for those who have ulterior motives, such as zoning out churches and private schools, or keeping wage rates low by barring the door to new factories that employ lots of people. Giles County can be more than adequately protected without ever zoning even a square inch of private property. Houston, with millions of people, is doing far better than we are, and they are completely unzoned. A little creativity, rather than an unthinking impulse to zone away people's property rights, goes a long way.
Anonymous, I don't understand the knee-jerk reflex to impose zoning as a social cure-all to every problem, real or imagined. But what I really cannot fathom is the willingness of anyone to defend the current LUMP. As I've patiently explained over and over, it doesn't provide anyone with any protection, and never will, without significant revision. And I've challenged LUMP supporters to explain or justify why it is that new churches and private schools are treated like nuisance industries by the LUMP.
Note that this was a damned deliberate action by Reedy and his crew -- the LUMP was copied word for word, typo for typo, from a 1991 zoning plan pushed by James Miller and Dan Speer. That plan did NOT zone out churches and private schools from the FAR zone. The LUMP plagiarizers had to make a deliberate effort to change that, and require the permission of the County Commission to build a church or private school in the FAR zone. (And please remember that if you can't put something in FAR, you can't put it anywhere! The mental midgets who crafted the LUMP put ALL OF GILES COUNTY into FAR.)
To those who think they're "protected" by the LUMP, I offer a $100 reward to anyone who can show where, under the present plan, an adult oriented business can locate. (Not having such a place means that the LUMP is an "abuse of discretion," and thus void, offering no protection against "adult" businesses.) And to those who think the state law offers "protection" against micromanagement by the local zoners, I offer a $100 reward to the first person that can cite the section of Tennessee Code Annotated which prohibits county zoning plans from dictating what color you can paint your house.
Surely, some pro-zoner somewhere, will rise to the occasion, and meet my challenge. Hey, anonymous, how about you? The reward money is all yours... all you have to do is prove that what I'm saying is wrong. That shouldn't be too hard, now should it???
And, finally, there's this:
Regarding a zoning "horror story" I mentioned in a reply above, here, via the Google cache, is the New York Times' account of the incident:
Finale to Zoning Opera
By WILLIAM GLABERSON,
Published: December 4, 1991
People here don't agree on how things got quite so far out of hand in the fight between the town (and its supporters) and Roger and Rhoda Scott (and their supporters) over the size of what until this morning was the Scotts' house on the shore of Skaneateles Lake.
But people here knew they had more going than a debate over zoning laws and the meaning of liberty. There was the name-calling, the threats against officials, the recent fugitive life of Mr. Scott, a Syracuse lawyer, and the jailing of Mrs. Scott, who describes herself as just a regular "fat, middle-aged housewife."
If there were any remaining doubters in Skaneateles (pronounced skin-ee-AT-a-lis, sounds like Minneapolis), a town of 7,800 about 20 miles southwest of Syracuse, that the battle had gone well beyond a run-of-the mill zoning fight, they should have been convinced by noon, when a backhoe made smithereens of what the Scotts said was a $750,000 International Revival style home.
Mrs. Scott, 56 years old, is now in Miami Beach, where she is resting after her stay in a Syracuse holding cell, where she was placed after a judge ruled the couple had violated a court order to leave the house. Her husband's whereabouts could not be learned. She called him a "fugitive."
'You Just Don't Walk Away'
In a telephone interview on Monday, she railed against the "Gestapo tactics" of the opposition -- particularly Charles T. Major, the Town Supervisor here who ordered the demolition today with the support of a State Supreme Court justice. She said the couple kept fighting the town because "You just don't walk away and say, 'Okay, you can have everything I've built my whole life'."
Mr. Major, who says he has been called both a Nazi and a Communist by those who disagree with him, said the town had no choice but to stand by the law. "You let one person get away with it," he said, "everybody else is going to get away with it."
The battle began after a fire in 1982, when the Scotts rebuilt on their lakeside lot and added many of the controversial features, including an indoor swimming pool and a three-car garage. According to Mr. Major, they made the house 2.7 times as large as it had been originally.
With the additions, Mr. Major said, the house covered more of their lot than town zoning laws permit, and was too close to the property's boundaries. He also said the Scotts omitted a series of other necessary legal steps concerning the pool, garage and decks and failed to register their septic system, which is near the lake that is Syracuse's water supply.
The Price of Peace
Roger Scott, 58, whose whereabouts have not always been known since the morning his wife was picked up by county deputies last month and taken to jail, always told reporters here that a town zoning inspector who is now dead gave him oral permission for all the disputed additions. Furthermore, he reportedly said, he was willing to compromise and make the house as small as a "cigar box" if that was the price of peace.
But peace, Mr. Major said, was never what the Scotts had in mind. Lawsuits, he said, were.
"It's one lawsuit after another," he said. They have sued just about everyone who had anything to do with Skaneateles, including "widows of past zoning board members," he said.
Mrs. Scott conceded that her husband, whom she described as "not a Caspar Milquetoast," had been involved in a few legal cases in his own behalf. One was a tussle a few years ago with the local lawyers' grievance committee, which did not approve of the way he was advertising to win legal clients. And she acknowledged that it was "probably" fair to describe the couple as litigious.
"We live in America," she said, "and in America, this is what you do. This isn't the Old West where you go to the O.K. Corral and have a shootout. You sue."
'Everybody's Petrified'
Some who have been drawn into the controversy by extensive local television and newspaper coverage, Mr. Major said, have taken it extremely personally. They have made anonymous bomb and death threats to town officials. "Everybody's petrified because of what's going on here," the supervisor said. The town had to search for a new demolition crew to do the job today after the original contractor backed out because of intimidation, Mr. Major said.
Some who say they are committed to such peaceful remedies as prayer say the fight is an archetypal struggle over the boundaries of freedom.
One of them is the Rev. Ronald F. Rice, an ordained Baptist minister who runs a tree removal service on the side and says he goes by the citizens' band radio "handle" of "Chainsaw Preacher."
Mr. Rice and some of his parishioners from the South Spafford Bible Church in the next town down the road from here have become active in the Scotts' cause. That, he said, is because they believe that all zoning laws are "immoral" and amount to government theft of private property.
"If a person cannot control his property, he is not really free," Mr. Rice said. "Those of us who own property are really serfs in a modern feudal system. We have to obey the lord, or else."
Different Views of Freedom
Last week, Mr. Rice and about 50 other Scott supporters gathered in the nearby town of Preble and formed a group to fight zoning laws. Its tentative name: Citizens for the Restoration and Preservation of Liberty.
But many here say the freedom at issue is that of everyone other than the Scotts. Some say they need zoning to limit development to protect the lake's purity and to keep houses like Rhoda and Roger Scott's from bulging out to the limits of their lots. One couple's Shangri-La, they say, is another Skaneatelean's eyesore.
"I don't know how he thought he could get away with it," said Robert C. Soderberg, a retired Monsanto Company executive who is a town resident. "This is a community that has respect for law and he has flaunted that house in front of everybody for I don't know how many years."
As for the couple at the center of the controversy, Mrs. Scott said she was not yet sure where they might live when the dust settles.
But they are, she said, planning for the future. In the works is a new Federal lawsuit to challenge the town. Their final destination, she said, is the United States Supreme Court.
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Yes, all of you Anononymouses, we sure do need zoning here in Giles County, so we can generate news stories like the one above. What person in their right mind would tear down a luxury house because the owner had "illegally" added a swimming pool and a garage?
Do any of the pro-zoners here want to defend this kind of bovine excrement? I didn't think so. But this is exactly the sort of idiocy that goes on when you strip landowners of their property rights, and allow politicians to make all the important land use decisions for them.
Kendrick..
Why do you still not grasp the simple concept that all the people out in the county want is protection? And that is not bovine excrement! Bet you are wearing your dictionary out? But, I am waiting to be impressed as your friend, Mr. Barrett, had previously stated about another matter.
If I decide to add a swimming pool behind my house, it is nobody's business but mine. And guess what? The ONLY person who will be interested in that is the tax assessor! Hey, I may add on to my chicken coop too...and paint the whole thing purple! hahahahahaha
Get this, I am a pro-zoner, as people like to call us!
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