5 ms·

Court upholds $573k penalty against CA homeowner who fixed cars in backyard

58 points by fortran77 4y ago

Clubber 4y ago
>Mauro cited a 2000 San Francisco case, in which courts ruled a $663,000 fee for ongoing code violations was not constitutionally excessive, as precedent. The world has gone mad.
- suyash 4y ago
  truly, let people do what they want in thier property, specially when they are building, hacking and making things for better. This is the spirit we should uphold and celebrate not punish in this country.
  - joyeuse6701 4y ago
    Working on a car on grass is an environmental issue. Oil and coolant are toxic. Owning property lets you do a lot of things, but not everything i.e. making such a mess or danger that you affect your neighbors, like never cleaning up dog shit causing a fly problem, or making a neighborhood unseemly by turning a house into a junkyard. I’m sympathetic to the man, that’s a massive fine, but it seems self inflicted when he could have obeyed the ruling, and sued the city at his leisure, avoiding the penalty costs.
    - javajosh 4y ago
      I wish the reporter had dug into a few more things: first, the impact on the neighbor. Did they just not like the look of it, or was there more? Second, what options he had to mitigate this. Was it the grass that was the problem, and could that have been mitigated by putting down some sort of fluid catching surface, could that have helped? My instinct is to support the old man who fixes things, but I'm cautious in coming to conclusions. He might have been doing real harm to his neighbor, or to the environment. He may have had reasonable outs and been stubborn and not taken them. We don't know enough, and I think that's a failure in journalism.
    - salawat 4y ago
      Property owner fences in backyard: Check Property Owner maintains vehicles: check Property owner owns propane and and gas powered generator for tools, keeps them within back yard: Check Californian having an aneurysm because someone uses their personal space in a way they don't like or understand: Check The absurdity is strong with this one. Oil is only an issue when changing or leaking, and even then only the once. If you've changing it, or have leaks, use a pan. If he's not doing that, charge him with that. It's not like simply having a car on the grass emits a wave of environmental destruction? Stop harassing the man. And if they're citing people for fruit on the grass, I want to see citations for leaves in autumn, yard furniture, hoses, sprinklers, bicycles, children's toys, planter boxes, and landscaping materials. Y'all would probably have a fit over composting.
    - illuminerdy 4y ago
      There's probably a middle ground where persons can be allowed to use their private property for businesses such as the one in this case, while still being subject to reasonable regulations that prevent environmental abuse and other such issues.
  - jen729w 4y ago
    Aaaaahhhhh I’ll play a bit of the Devil’s advocate here and say: you don’t live next door. It might well be the case that living next door to this guy is hell on Earth. You shouldn’t just be allowed to do what you want just because you own a block of suburban land. We live in a society.
    - Clubber 4y ago
      I seriously doubt it. Working on cars isn't noisy. Had he been a chainsaw sculptor, maybe. My comment was on the amount they thought was ok to fine him and the fact a judge didn't find it excessive. I suspect it was more of a bureaucratic, "you will respect my authorit-a" type thing and the judge didn't keep them in check.
      - havelhovel 4y ago
        > Working on cars isn't noisy. That is not my experience at any mechanic's shop ever! And even without all the fancy tools, my neighbor was banging on their engine for hours just last weekend. Maybe they don't know what they're doing, and therefore it doesn't count as work, but it sure was loud.
      - cafard 4y ago
        It's not clear to me that he was working on cars. Thinking about working on cars, planning to work on cars, sure.
    - sillysaurusx 4y ago
      Playing devil’s advocate is fun, but you don’t know. And it’s hard to imagine how fixing a car could be hell on earth for the neighbors. Listen to how it sounds. It’s over half a million dollars for fixing a car, man (woman; I wish there was a gender neutral term that had the same flexibility, since “bud” just sounds aggressive).
      - Shog9 4y ago
        It's trivial to imagine, if you've ever worked on a car, had a "car guy" neighbor, lived near a service shop, etc. Many cars are neither quiet nor do they confine their emissions to property boundaries.
  - kmbfjr 4y ago
    Let me know how you feel when your neighbor starts animal rendering and leather tanning at scale.
    - tacoluv 4y ago
      Making them homeless might be a bit of an overkill for that transgression, no?
- goldcd 4y ago
  My guess is that this is (as mentioned here in the article) the problem with (somewhat more) reasonable fines per day, snowballing. If it's not criminal, and all you can do is fine, and no action is taken to prevent the the fine incurring - I'm not really sure what option there is. Do you cap it? Send in the bailiff's to remove the offending thing at a certain point? Just write it all off, setting a precendent? I've genuinely no idea.
  - Clubber 4y ago
    Yes, there should certainly be a cap. $573,000 sounds like it would be from an unreasonable government at best, authoritarian government at worst with no common sense.
    - goldcd 4y ago
      But the problem with caps, is that people hit them. As a hypothetical, imagine a polluting plant poisoning the neighbourhood. You want them to know once their fine gets to $1M it's capped? You've suddenly presented a clear choice to the plant - fix it if it'll cost less than $1M, if it'll cost more keep ignore. If you're going to fine anybody "per unit of time", you have to keep it open-ended (as otherwise the only people who'll ignore you, are those making more profit per day, than the per day cost)
      - Clubber 4y ago
        It's not an all or nothing thing. You can cap some fines and not others obviously. Fining someone $573,000 for having vehicles in his back yard and working on them is ludicrous and absolutely makes the government look like either a bully, out of touch with reality, incompetent, or all of the above.
kqr2 4y ago
In case anyone was wondering how that penalty came to be: He still owes $573,000 in code violations — which accumulated over years with penalties of $250 per day.
Espressosaurus 4y ago
"The appeals court ruling notes Altstatt contested the city’s code enforcement actions that year. The city sued him in 2015, and he has battled the city in court since then, recently acting as his own attorney." (emphasis mine) So he has an idiot for a lawyer. No wonder he lost.
- suyash 4y ago
  idoits are the people in gov who charged him for hacking / pursuing his hobbies in his property.
  - crooked-v 4y ago
    As noted in the city's response, the guy's hobbies were playing host to rat nests bad enough to affect the neighbors.
  - manicdee 4y ago
    It’s only hacking if you do something with it. Otherwise it is just hoarding.
- ryandrake 4y ago
  You're getting downvoted because of the harsh language, but you're right. The defendant brought a banana to a gun fight. Downvoters, please read the actual ruling[1]. He didn't even seem to understand the basics of defending oneself in court, filing motions in the wrong order, making arguments without evidence, and so on. What he should have done was 1. stop doing whatever it is he was accused of until the case cleared up, so fines stopped accruing, and 2. hired a competent attorney to defend him. He didn't do either of these and instead winged it in court complaining about how unfair everything was. I am totally on his side, too. It's ridiculous that you can't work on cars in your backyard. But he did everything wrong in his interactions with the State. If $500K was on the line, would you just yolo it and act as your own attorney? 1: https://www.courts.ca.gov/opinions/nonpub/C092141.PDF https://www.courts.ca.gov/opinions/nonpub/C092141.PDF
mesk 4y ago
Just guessing, having few operable or inoperable tanks on the backyard would be ok, because of 2nd amendment ;) omg...
- aYsY4dDQ2NrcNzA 4y ago
  As a matter of fact, the world’s largest private collection of tanks was owned by Jacques Littlefield (a resident of Portola Valley, California). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques_Littlefield https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques_Littlefield
butwhywhyoh 4y ago
> A neighbor complained, and the city cited him, claiming all the vehicles appeared to be inoperable. It also issued violations for other backyard items — car parts, generators, propane tanks and fruit that had fallen off his orange and grapefruit trees. Cited for fruit that fell off of your own trees into your own yard. Absolute insanity.
- crooked-v 4y ago
  The city has noted complaints from neighbors about rat infestations. I feel like that puts 'leaving fruit lying around' in a different light.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- vorticalbox 4y ago
  What a world we live in. Sometimes I wonder how these sorts of things get put into law and not a single person at any point thought "maybe this is stupid?" Only way I could see this being a sensible thing, for limit the attraction of wild life into cities.
thatswrong0 4y ago
Insanity. How on earth can anyone, let alone a judge with a law degree, think that this is at all reasonable (precedent or not). California really needs to clean house and get some fresh perspective in its legal system. Sidenote: I really do wish the US followed the doctrine of abiding by the "spirit of the law" rather than the "letter of the law" in trivial civil determinations such as this.
- paxys 4y ago
  It didn't randomly come out of the blue. He ignored city fines and various court judgements for 8+ years. Of course the penalties are going to add up.
  - brokenkebab2 4y ago
    Frankly, I don't see how it justifies the sum. The guy can be a stubborn fool, and $573000 is still a crazy amount
    - paxys 4y ago
      So then no one should ever pay any fines for anything, and then eventually after repeated violations over years when it becomes too large it should all get written off because it is a "crazy amount"?
      - brokenkebab2 4y ago
        Not sure how it comes from my comment. There are plenty of ways to enforce fines without first going higher than orbit
        paxys 4y ago
        What are these ways? Send repeated notices? Sue them? Get a court order? They already did all of this.
justinzollars 4y ago
- DrewRWx 4y ago
  One city government doesn't represent California as a whole.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
gjsman-1000 4y ago
I'm amazed that I have just seen a second example of CA Court B.S. in the same day. The first event today was when a court declared that bumblebees could be legally considered fish. https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/bees-are-fish-under-calif-endangered-species-act-state-court-2022-06-01/ https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/bees-are-fish-under...
olliej 4y ago
This article is exceedingly [and I feel intentionally] misleading. The dude has accumulated years of fines and penalties, as a result of failing to respond to complaints from the neighborhood. His argument is not that he isn't violating any law, it's that the law literally does not apply to him. The city actually responded in a blog post: https://sacramentocityexpress.com/2022/04/19/city-corrects-misleading-article-on-code-enforcement-from-the-sacramento-bee/ https://sacramentocityexpress.com/2022/04/19/city-corrects-m... He has lost his defense in part because he was defending himself (eg idiot lawyer), presumably the reason he was defending himself is that no attorney would willing take up his case, as his argument isn't the "fees are excessive". His argument is that the law does not apply to him at all. For example: 'In court filings, Altstatt has argued that it “has not been proved … that any constitution operates on (him),”', etc The city didn't seek out ordinance violations, the city started getting continuing complaints from the guys neighbors. The city also claims to have offered a lot of help to deal with the issues. When it did fine him, his appeals were similar to the above insanity.
- tacoluv 4y ago
  Yeah - so the fair thing to do is to make him homeless when he is 80, right? Dude, does it ever occur to you that some rules are wrong and humans making decisions might be wrong? You are responding to the wrong sentiment.
  - crooked-v 4y ago
    If he really can't afford it, that's what bankruptcy (and its exemptions like a personal home) is for, though given how much he's ignored for that eight years it might take a court-appointed attorney to do it for him.
    - cudgy 4y ago
      Fines may be attached to the property, not the person, so bankruptcy may not remove the claim.
  - olliej 4y ago
tacoluv 4y ago
Can we sue California for abusing a person who has done nothing wrong?
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
LatteLazy 4y ago
While I think people should have much wider freedom in what they do on their property, this is a terrible example case.
hilyen 4y ago
Zoning laws are stupid as hell, it prevents upward movement of the middle-class because in order to afford to rent a space to do business in the approved locations in California, you must be a millionaire. Him doing work in his backyard wasn't hurting anyone. If people can work remotely from the comfort of their own home, he should be able to also.
- crooked-v 4y ago
  As noted the city, the complaints from his neighbors include rat infestations, which suggests less 'work' and more 'hoarding'.
  - aaomidi 4y ago
    Rat infestation is such a subjective term. Rats are literally everywhere.
    - crooked-v 4y ago
      "Rat infestation" is a subjective term, but multiple neighbors complaining enough about rats for fines to stack up indefinitely isn't a subjective phenomenon.
      - voisin 4y ago
        Not defending this guy but NIMBY-types tend to attribute all negative things that occur in an area to the “black sheep” they don’t want around.
        hellisothers 4y ago
        Not defending NIMBYs or YIMBYs but lumping this case under the anti-NIMBY tent is really stretching the meaning of YIMBY.
    - oceanghost 4y ago
      Right? If you've never lived on a farm you don't know what rats are. The wort thing is, if you can kill the rats in your barn, you create a power vacuum for the rats around you to invade. It's a maddening problem.
timcavel 4y ago
skyzyx 4y ago
Never, ever, ever, ever, ever act as your own attorney.
salgernon 4y ago
I keep seeing comments to the effect that this poor duffer was just fixing his car - but that is disingenuous. If he fixed these things they wouldn’t be there. This is simply a case of an obstinate hoarder complaining about being called out (fined) and then dragging out compliance while fines piled up. The fact that he’s 83 is immaterial- he was 75 when first cited.
- rasz 4y ago
  According to court documents he was also hoarding -generator -propane tank -fruit that had fallen off his orange and grapefruit trees
8bitsrule 4y ago
Sounds a lot like annoyed bureaucrats making a very expensive example of one guy defending what appears to be (we don't have all the facts) a harmless action, to teach all citizens a lesson. There was a time when repairing your own vehicle was widely applauded ... and well-supported by commerce. Maybe he could have afforded a lawyer until the $250-a-day fine began. (The modern version of Lord's vassals whipping someone.)

58 points by fortran77 4y ago

>Mauro cited a 2000 San Francisco case, in which courts ruled a $663,000 fee for ongoing code violations was not constitutionally excessive, as precedent. The world has gone mad.

suyash 4y ago
truly, let people do what they want in thier property, specially when they are building, hacking and making things for better. This is the spirit we should uphold and celebrate not punish in this country.
- joyeuse6701 4y ago
  Working on a car on grass is an environmental issue. Oil and coolant are toxic. Owning property lets you do a lot of things, but not everything i.e. making such a mess or danger that you affect your neighbors, like never cleaning up dog shit causing a fly problem, or making a neighborhood unseemly by turning a house into a junkyard. I’m sympathetic to the man, that’s a massive fine, but it seems self inflicted when he could have obeyed the ruling, and sued the city at his leisure, avoiding the penalty costs.
  - javajosh 4y ago
    I wish the reporter had dug into a few more things: first, the impact on the neighbor. Did they just not like the look of it, or was there more? Second, what options he had to mitigate this. Was it the grass that was the problem, and could that have been mitigated by putting down some sort of fluid catching surface, could that have helped? My instinct is to support the old man who fixes things, but I'm cautious in coming to conclusions. He might have been doing real harm to his neighbor, or to the environment. He may have had reasonable outs and been stubborn and not taken them. We don't know enough, and I think that's a failure in journalism.
  - salawat 4y ago
    Property owner fences in backyard: Check Property Owner maintains vehicles: check Property owner owns propane and and gas powered generator for tools, keeps them within back yard: Check Californian having an aneurysm because someone uses their personal space in a way they don't like or understand: Check The absurdity is strong with this one. Oil is only an issue when changing or leaking, and even then only the once. If you've changing it, or have leaks, use a pan. If he's not doing that, charge him with that. It's not like simply having a car on the grass emits a wave of environmental destruction? Stop harassing the man. And if they're citing people for fruit on the grass, I want to see citations for leaves in autumn, yard furniture, hoses, sprinklers, bicycles, children's toys, planter boxes, and landscaping materials. Y'all would probably have a fit over composting.
  - illuminerdy 4y ago
    There's probably a middle ground where persons can be allowed to use their private property for businesses such as the one in this case, while still being subject to reasonable regulations that prevent environmental abuse and other such issues.
- jen729w 4y ago
  Aaaaahhhhh I’ll play a bit of the Devil’s advocate here and say: you don’t live next door. It might well be the case that living next door to this guy is hell on Earth. You shouldn’t just be allowed to do what you want just because you own a block of suburban land. We live in a society.
  - Clubber 4y ago
    I seriously doubt it. Working on cars isn't noisy. Had he been a chainsaw sculptor, maybe. My comment was on the amount they thought was ok to fine him and the fact a judge didn't find it excessive. I suspect it was more of a bureaucratic, "you will respect my authorit-a" type thing and the judge didn't keep them in check.
    - havelhovel 4y ago
      > Working on cars isn't noisy. That is not my experience at any mechanic's shop ever! And even without all the fancy tools, my neighbor was banging on their engine for hours just last weekend. Maybe they don't know what they're doing, and therefore it doesn't count as work, but it sure was loud.
    - cafard 4y ago
      It's not clear to me that he was working on cars. Thinking about working on cars, planning to work on cars, sure.
  - sillysaurusx 4y ago
    Playing devil’s advocate is fun, but you don’t know. And it’s hard to imagine how fixing a car could be hell on earth for the neighbors. Listen to how it sounds. It’s over half a million dollars for fixing a car, man (woman; I wish there was a gender neutral term that had the same flexibility, since “bud” just sounds aggressive).
    - Shog9 4y ago
      It's trivial to imagine, if you've ever worked on a car, had a "car guy" neighbor, lived near a service shop, etc. Many cars are neither quiet nor do they confine their emissions to property boundaries.
- kmbfjr 4y ago
  Let me know how you feel when your neighbor starts animal rendering and leather tanning at scale.
  - tacoluv 4y ago
    Making them homeless might be a bit of an overkill for that transgression, no?
goldcd 4y ago
My guess is that this is (as mentioned here in the article) the problem with (somewhat more) reasonable fines per day, snowballing. If it's not criminal, and all you can do is fine, and no action is taken to prevent the the fine incurring - I'm not really sure what option there is. Do you cap it? Send in the bailiff's to remove the offending thing at a certain point? Just write it all off, setting a precendent? I've genuinely no idea.
- Clubber 4y ago
  Yes, there should certainly be a cap. $573,000 sounds like it would be from an unreasonable government at best, authoritarian government at worst with no common sense.
  - goldcd 4y ago
    But the problem with caps, is that people hit them. As a hypothetical, imagine a polluting plant poisoning the neighbourhood. You want them to know once their fine gets to $1M it's capped? You've suddenly presented a clear choice to the plant - fix it if it'll cost less than $1M, if it'll cost more keep ignore. If you're going to fine anybody "per unit of time", you have to keep it open-ended (as otherwise the only people who'll ignore you, are those making more profit per day, than the per day cost)
    - Clubber 4y ago
      It's not an all or nothing thing. You can cap some fines and not others obviously. Fining someone $573,000 for having vehicles in his back yard and working on them is ludicrous and absolutely makes the government look like either a bully, out of touch with reality, incompetent, or all of the above.

kqr2 4y ago

In case anyone was wondering how that penalty came to be: He still owes $573,000 in code violations — which accumulated over years with penalties of $250 per day.

Espressosaurus 4y ago

"The appeals court ruling notes Altstatt contested the city’s code enforcement actions that year. The city sued him in 2015, and he has battled the city in court since then, recently acting as his own attorney." (emphasis mine) So he has an idiot for a lawyer. No wonder he lost.

suyash 4y ago
idoits are the people in gov who charged him for hacking / pursuing his hobbies in his property.
- crooked-v 4y ago
  As noted in the city's response, the guy's hobbies were playing host to rat nests bad enough to affect the neighbors.
- manicdee 4y ago
  It’s only hacking if you do something with it. Otherwise it is just hoarding.
ryandrake 4y ago
You're getting downvoted because of the harsh language, but you're right. The defendant brought a banana to a gun fight. Downvoters, please read the actual ruling[1]. He didn't even seem to understand the basics of defending oneself in court, filing motions in the wrong order, making arguments without evidence, and so on. What he should have done was 1. stop doing whatever it is he was accused of until the case cleared up, so fines stopped accruing, and 2. hired a competent attorney to defend him. He didn't do either of these and instead winged it in court complaining about how unfair everything was. I am totally on his side, too. It's ridiculous that you can't work on cars in your backyard. But he did everything wrong in his interactions with the State. If $500K was on the line, would you just yolo it and act as your own attorney? 1: https://www.courts.ca.gov/opinions/nonpub/C092141.PDF https://www.courts.ca.gov/opinions/nonpub/C092141.PDF

mesk 4y ago

Just guessing, having few operable or inoperable tanks on the backyard would be ok, because of 2nd amendment ;) omg...

aYsY4dDQ2NrcNzA 4y ago
As a matter of fact, the world’s largest private collection of tanks was owned by Jacques Littlefield (a resident of Portola Valley, California). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques_Littlefield https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques_Littlefield

butwhywhyoh 4y ago

> A neighbor complained, and the city cited him, claiming all the vehicles appeared to be inoperable. It also issued violations for other backyard items — car parts, generators, propane tanks and fruit that had fallen off his orange and grapefruit trees. Cited for fruit that fell off of your own trees into your own yard. Absolute insanity.

crooked-v 4y ago
The city has noted complaints from neighbors about rat infestations. I feel like that puts 'leaving fruit lying around' in a different light.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
vorticalbox 4y ago
What a world we live in. Sometimes I wonder how these sorts of things get put into law and not a single person at any point thought "maybe this is stupid?" Only way I could see this being a sensible thing, for limit the attraction of wild life into cities.

thatswrong0 4y ago

Insanity. How on earth can anyone, let alone a judge with a law degree, think that this is at all reasonable (precedent or not). California really needs to clean house and get some fresh perspective in its legal system. Sidenote: I really do wish the US followed the doctrine of abiding by the "spirit of the law" rather than the "letter of the law" in trivial civil determinations such as this.

paxys 4y ago
It didn't randomly come out of the blue. He ignored city fines and various court judgements for 8+ years. Of course the penalties are going to add up.
- brokenkebab2 4y ago
  Frankly, I don't see how it justifies the sum. The guy can be a stubborn fool, and $573000 is still a crazy amount
  - paxys 4y ago
    So then no one should ever pay any fines for anything, and then eventually after repeated violations over years when it becomes too large it should all get written off because it is a "crazy amount"?
    - brokenkebab2 4y ago
      Not sure how it comes from my comment. There are plenty of ways to enforce fines without first going higher than orbit
      - paxys 4y ago
        What are these ways? Send repeated notices? Sue them? Get a court order? They already did all of this.

justinzollars 4y ago

DrewRWx 4y ago
One city government doesn't represent California as a whole.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

gjsman-1000 4y ago

I'm amazed that I have just seen a second example of CA Court B.S. in the same day. The first event today was when a court declared that bumblebees could be legally considered fish. https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/bees-are-fish-under-calif-endangered-species-act-state-court-2022-06-01/ https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/bees-are-fish-under...

olliej 4y ago

This article is exceedingly [and I feel intentionally] misleading. The dude has accumulated years of fines and penalties, as a result of failing to respond to complaints from the neighborhood. His argument is not that he isn't violating any law, it's that the law literally does not apply to him. The city actually responded in a blog post: https://sacramentocityexpress.com/2022/04/19/city-corrects-misleading-article-on-code-enforcement-from-the-sacramento-bee/ https://sacramentocityexpress.com/2022/04/19/city-corrects-m... He has lost his defense in part because he was defending himself (eg idiot lawyer), presumably the reason he was defending himself is that no attorney would willing take up his case, as his argument isn't the "fees are excessive". His argument is that the law does not apply to him at all. For example: 'In court filings, Altstatt has argued that it “has not been proved … that any constitution operates on (him),”', etc The city didn't seek out ordinance violations, the city started getting continuing complaints from the guys neighbors. The city also claims to have offered a lot of help to deal with the issues. When it did fine him, his appeals were similar to the above insanity.

tacoluv 4y ago
Yeah - so the fair thing to do is to make him homeless when he is 80, right? Dude, does it ever occur to you that some rules are wrong and humans making decisions might be wrong? You are responding to the wrong sentiment.
- crooked-v 4y ago
  If he really can't afford it, that's what bankruptcy (and its exemptions like a personal home) is for, though given how much he's ignored for that eight years it might take a court-appointed attorney to do it for him.
  - cudgy 4y ago
    Fines may be attached to the property, not the person, so bankruptcy may not remove the claim.
- olliej 4y ago

tacoluv 4y ago

Can we sue California for abusing a person who has done nothing wrong?

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

LatteLazy 4y ago

While I think people should have much wider freedom in what they do on their property, this is a terrible example case.

hilyen 4y ago

Zoning laws are stupid as hell, it prevents upward movement of the middle-class because in order to afford to rent a space to do business in the approved locations in California, you must be a millionaire. Him doing work in his backyard wasn't hurting anyone. If people can work remotely from the comfort of their own home, he should be able to also.

crooked-v 4y ago
As noted the city, the complaints from his neighbors include rat infestations, which suggests less 'work' and more 'hoarding'.
- aaomidi 4y ago
  Rat infestation is such a subjective term. Rats are literally everywhere.
  - crooked-v 4y ago
    "Rat infestation" is a subjective term, but multiple neighbors complaining enough about rats for fines to stack up indefinitely isn't a subjective phenomenon.
    - voisin 4y ago
      Not defending this guy but NIMBY-types tend to attribute all negative things that occur in an area to the “black sheep” they don’t want around.
      - hellisothers 4y ago
        Not defending NIMBYs or YIMBYs but lumping this case under the anti-NIMBY tent is really stretching the meaning of YIMBY.
  - oceanghost 4y ago
    Right? If you've never lived on a farm you don't know what rats are. The wort thing is, if you can kill the rats in your barn, you create a power vacuum for the rats around you to invade. It's a maddening problem.

timcavel 4y ago

skyzyx 4y ago

Never, ever, ever, ever, ever act as your own attorney.

salgernon 4y ago

I keep seeing comments to the effect that this poor duffer was just fixing his car - but that is disingenuous. If he fixed these things they wouldn’t be there. This is simply a case of an obstinate hoarder complaining about being called out (fined) and then dragging out compliance while fines piled up. The fact that he’s 83 is immaterial- he was 75 when first cited.

rasz 4y ago
According to court documents he was also hoarding -generator -propane tank -fruit that had fallen off his orange and grapefruit trees

8bitsrule 4y ago

Sounds a lot like annoyed bureaucrats making a very expensive example of one guy defending what appears to be (we don't have all the facts) a harmless action, to teach all citizens a lesson. There was a time when repairing your own vehicle was widely applauded ... and well-supported by commerce. Maybe he could have afforded a lawyer until the $250-a-day fine began. (The modern version of Lord's vassals whipping someone.)