Posted on 10/02/2004 12:24:40 PM PDT by aimhigh
A Bend-area developer who demolished a local landmark before getting the necessary permit will have to pay a $100,000 penalty, a De-schutes County Circuit judge has ruled.
Judge Michael Adler found that Crown Investment LLC skirted the legal process when it leveled a well-loved 67-year-old mill without the permission of the city or the court.
Adler said the $100,000 award must be used by the city to construct a memorial to the crane shed.
excerpt
(Excerpt) Read more at news.statesmanjournal.com ...
Deuteronomy 4:28 And there ye shall serve gods, the work of men's hands, wood and stone, which neither see, nor hear, nor eat, nor smell.
ya bet me to it, grumble, grumble, grumble.Oh well .
farmfriend, any thoughts?
FMCDH(BITS)
67 years old is barely even "the past." If you sold the building as an antique, that would be fraud.
Prudent move by the developer. The uasable land and not having to restore the barn must be worth more than the fines.
The environmental and anti-development freaks are killing off jobs by the hundreds, stamping out the entrepreneurial spirit and incentive for growth.
In my county a few years ago a retired man built himself a house to replace the trailer he had lived in for many years. The building inspector said he would have to tear it down because the ceiling was ONE INCH too low. After a six-month long bitter fight with the planning commission he ended up burning it to the ground.
The future is fraught with frustratingly fettered fenestra.
No one here is saying that there should be no development. But the smartest developers realize that these old structures add charm, and therefore value, to their new projects. In any case the desires of the people who gave this developer permission to build should be respected, and if they say they want an old mill left standing, for whatever reasons, then by God that mill should be left standing. It is not up to a developer, an interloper, to determine what structures are precious to local residents and what should be left up. I say, I'm glad the so-and-so got a big fine. Next time he won't fire up his bulldozers quite so quickly.
If you (or the community) think someone else's property should be preserved, then buy it and preserve it yourself.
Anything else is confiscation of property.
If I stated my honest opinion of what I think of this extortion method and its thin veneer of legality, and the people who enforce it, I might be banned from this site and even arrested.
Sorry pierre, but thuggery is thuggery no matter how many thugs line up behind you to say yeah, we love that old farmhouse. You can go hold a gun to his head or have the local cops do it, it's still stealing and reprehensible.
Private property is the underpinning of a free society. No exceptions!
The future's window is shackled?
The 'we' can buy the beautiful old farm house. The problem is that liberals want all the goodies with no cost. It's called theft.
I have updated my FMCDH (From My Cold Dead Hands) sign-off with the addition of (BITS).....Blood In The Streets, which I foresee coming soon, due to the enormous increase of the Marxist progressive movement being shoved down the throat of this failing REPUBLIC through the Judicial tyranny of fiat law, the passing of unconstitutional laws by the Legislative and Executive branches of our government and the enormous tax burden placed upon the average American to support unconstitutional programs put forth by Marxist ideology.
Keep your powder dry.
FMCDH(BITS)
First, land is not sold to an innocent developer who is then blindsided by hysterical preservationists and others who demand controls on the development; before he buys any land, a developer (almost invariably a company, not an individual) does a due-diligence examination of the requirements surrounding any development, so that he is aware of issues of zoning, transportation, water supply, land percolation, road use, historical sensitivity, safety impact, school impact, and so forth. No developer wants to be surprised to learn that (for instance) the land can't bear necessary septic fields and city water and sewers arent' going to be available, so investigations go on for awhile before a sale is made. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, the developer knows quite well about the historic associations of a site before he goes in.
Yes, it's true that there are usually land conservancies and preservation groups that will try to buy an historically sensitive structure in order to preserve it. That kind of thing doesn't happen overnight, though; it takes time to raise funds. The development permissions are usually granted by local authority with the stipulation that the developer will not damage any historic structure long enough to give the preservation groups time to raise money. If a developer agrees to these undertakings and then arranges a little midnight arson, he is not only committing a felony but has bought the land under false pretenses. In other words, he has lied and cheated for his profit. If the developer doesn't want to deal with such responsibilities, he shouldn't get involved with that particular piece of land in the first place. There's a lot of land out there that doesn't have an old mill or battlefield or graveyard on it.
Now you may think, as libertarians tend to, that local government has no right to impose any restrictions on land use. Stop and think about it, though: if a developer comes in and makes a huge profit from building, say, a townhouse community, the economic strain on the surrounding area is going to be huge. The developer walks away with millions in his pocket, but the surrounding community is left holding the bag for all the new roads, schools, health care facilities, police and fire protection, water and sewage treatment, utilities, and other demands that many thousands of new residents place on the local infrastructure. Since everybody's taxes get driven up to astronomical levels by bad land-use decisions, the local community does have the right to make sure all these things are taken into account during the planning stage.
ROFL
Not hardly.
Do you know how many fees a developer has to pay to get permission from the government to actually build on his own property? Even the most minimal expansion of an existing business invokes tens of thousands of dollars, at least here in Oregon, in the few places where you actually can expand or build.
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