Institute for Justice
Posted on 05/22/2018 6:08:44 AM PDT by servo1969
A small St. Louis suburb has agreed to stop trying bankroll its government with a vicious regime of petty fines so excessive that the town has cited more than a third of its population.
Credit goes to the Institute for Justice, which sued the tiny town of Pagedale (population: 3,300) on behalf of a handful of residents in 2015. Amid the outrage over Michael Brown's death in nearby Ferguson, citizens of these small fiefdoms drew attention to these governments' propensity to bankroll themselves via exorbitant traffic and code enforcement fines.
Pagedale was one of those communities. In the course of a single year, it handed out 2,000 code enforcement citations--almost twice the number of actual households in the city. It tossed out tickets like confetti for a host of really absurd codes, which banned everything from mismatched curtains to holes in window screens to having your pants below your waist to having a barbecue grill or basketball hoop in your front yard to walking on the left side of a crosswalk.
The town's budget depended heavily on these fines. In some years, their proceeds made up a quarter of the city's revenue, according to the Institute for Justice. And the code citations got worse once the state cracked down to stop cities from trying to rake in money from traffic tickets. Eventually, 39 percent of the city's adult population had been fined for some sort of housing violation.
The courts then deliberately rushed through the cases and made it hard for residents to object or respond, saddling some citizens with thousands of dollars in debt. One of the plaintiffs represented by the Institute for Justice received nearly $3,000 in citations which he was struggling to pay off. And because he was spending the money to pay the fines, he couldn't afford the repairs the city demanded, resulting in more citations. Eventually the city threatened to raze his home. Another one of the institute's clients had to turn to payday loans to try to keep up with the fines.
Relief is now on the way. On Friday a federal judge accepted a consent decree from the City of Pagedale to reform its practices. The town has agreed to repeal the parts of municipal code that allowed them to cite citizens for conditions that were not public health or safety hazards. The decree specifically mentions that the aforementioned restrictions on pants, grills, and crosswalk practices will be repealed. The city won't be able to manufacture some sort of public safety excuse to keep them intact.
Furthermore the city will stop prosecuting current cases like these unless the prosecutor can find good cause to do so; will dismiss any additional fines and fees on citizens who have already paid more than their initial fine for a citation; will stop incarcerating people for these municipal violations if they don't have counsel and have not agreed to waive their rights; and will make the courts more accessible, with a broader range of hours and a rule limiting the number of hearings per session to seven, as opposed to the more than 200 proceedings that had previously churned through on some days.
The Institute for Justice is celebrating the win:
"Across the country, the government has resorted to using policing for profit to wrest money from individuals who are often the poorest and most vulnerable among us," said IJ President Scott Bullock. "This case, like IJ's work in fighting civil forfeiture, is a vital part of IJ's efforts to end this abusive and short-sighted practice. Because the Constitution forbids the government from using the justice system as a means to raise revenue, IJ will continue this fight across the country."
Read more about the case here, and read the consent agreement itself here.
Government is just a word for the things we choose to do together. - H. Clinton
Resident: Is this legal?
Inspector: Is that a question? There’s a $2 asking-a-question tax.
Government is organized legalized theft anymore.
L
Who voted for these guys?
Don’t complain when their property taxes go up to make up for the lost revenue.
Jackson Township in New Jersey operates in the same illegal ways as this town in the article does.
Code enforcement officer, yes they are like “real cops”, however they can’t see a 2 story high mulch pile which was against code and a real fire danger, but will go nuclear on a homeowner with 1” too high grass or a basketball hoop in the front yard. Oh knoes! It all depends on who you know down in chity hall and of course, if you donate money to the politically corrupt.
Zoning is just a way to control the masses, the real estate by the politically corrupt without having to buy a single square foot of real estate.
“Who voted for these guys?”
Darn good question. A good reporter might have gone into a bit more background on what the government of that town is composed of.
“Who voted for these guys?”
Code enforcement, zoning officials are generally public employees with more power then anyone in town. They are not voted in, they are “hired” by your political elite.
St. Louis suburban towns are notorious for this crap. I guess the area is too close to Illinois and caught the graft.
Ann all black city government preying on a nearly all black population. How can that happen? </sarc>
You don’t think this crap happens in all white towns? It does...
Of course it does.
This kind of stuff used to happen in Asbury Park, NJ. May still happen for all I know. They threw a friend of mine in jail for having a broken railing on his front porch.
As the Queen said: “It took a village”. :-(
Wow. That’s your take? Low level government idiots using their little fiefdom to oppress people who can’t defend themselves and your concern is their property taxes?
You would think after years of being abused by code enforcement officers that the voters in the town would have replaced the legislature and executives who are elected with a group that would have changed the policies or re-written the laws to prevent this kind of harassment.
MJ
Local tyranny is real.
Thanks to the Constituion, it is not quite as bad as national tyranny, because you can move to another location.
But it can be pretty bad.
Try bucking the local elites in your area. It isn’t pretty.
Code enforcement is there to keep those people for being elected, they are the dirty of the dirty cops. They are there to protect the power elite and stomp down anyone who may or may not be a threat to that structure. The minute someone outside the “party” tries to run, they will be harassed with a million summons about their property.
And even if you do win, you will need others on the board as well who would want to repeal those laws, and you can’t fire the code enforcers, their unions will sue you and the town.
Who runs the town? It aint the people I tell you.
So where's the money going, hmmmm?
The fines may have been addressed, but not the spending problem.
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