I think you should pay very close attention to present and future chain of ownership of that lot. That will tell you where the corruption lies.
It’s often done through distaff shirttail relations because the difference in last names hides relationships better.
You should also be disturbed by the fact that the city jailed somebody for zoning violations, that is never a sign of good use of city resources, tying up courts and jail space with non violent offenders.
And stable or unstable, it is the government that has a positive duty to safeguard the rights of citizens and this, the city of Roswell did not do, instead they used their power to abuse a weaker citizen for its own benefit.
May you always be lucky in your status and relationships so that you never find yourself in the same position, stripped by bureaucratic malfeasance of everything you own, all under the color of law for the public “good”.
I’m with you. Follow the money.
I don’t doubt that this guy was fighting city hall for the sake of fighting city hall after awhile, and that after he became a PITA the folks in authority decided they’d win the pissing match come Hell or high water.
If he’d of hurt somebody else on his way off this ball of mud I’d have no sympathy for him.
As it stands, after reading this thread my bet is that the somebody with a little power decided he was a crazy coot and therefore they could bully him. I don’t know if how it ended was worth it (and I’m guessing he did himself in) but I can’t help but admire his sand.
I don’t know that he was blameless, but for all the times in my life I’ve wanted to punch an officious jerk in the nose but just smiled instead...well, I can’t condone it, but I understand it.
Just so you understand where I'm coming from -- I've played in the big leagues - City of Atlanta ZRB and BZA, the city/county tax commissioner, and even the city council. I've not only fought City Hall -- I've won (and after I won, I moved to a more congenial rural area). I have no love for the petty zoning Nazis that you find in any city zoning department, because I dealt with them for 25 years.
With that said, my primary concern here is the way this story developed, and what it says about memes, prejudice, and knee-jerk reactions.
This is obviously a conservative, small-government, leave-me-alone type message board, and we self-select for those inclinations. But there's a danger in that.
Substitute for a moment "Trayvon Martin" here. We start with an inflammatory news article that doesn't give all the facts and uses a lot of buzz words that evoke a particular reaction. The target audience already has an inclination to sympathize with the named victim and to dislike the accused perpetrators, so they all go, "Yeah!" The accusations become wilder and wilder, to the point of organized conspiracies and even murder.
Then somebody says, "wait a minute, I know somebody in the neighborhood and this isn't how she says it went down." The response: "This is all a conspiracy. All government officials are conspiring to steal this guy's land. The congressman is in on it too because his wife's on city council." - "Wait a minute. These facts don't line up. And I know some of these people and they're not bad people." - "You're in on it. You're part of the conspiracy too!"
It's not just the media that has memes and automatically assumes facts to fit them.
These are real people. Roswell is a small town. I have a lot of friends there, my son went to school there, I live nearby. You don't. Where you see a monolithic faceless government, I see human beings that I have personally dealt with. That causes me to be concerned when people are throwing really serious accusations around about my neighbors.
All I'm saying is, let's make sure we have the facts and that this is the hill we want to defend. If we go ballistic on every sensational news story, then when there really is an example of overreaching and government bullying, we will have lost our credibility.