Posted on 06/10/2009 6:29:47 PM PDT by Jessica2677
Sadly in today's society, that is the best advice. Look how restrictive HOA's are, and at the same time how many people love them. At least HOA's are contractual. Add the city/county ordaninces, busybodies, and revenue enhancement officers, and that's why I refuse to live in city limits or a subdivision.
I disagree. Nobody's going to win by challenging the ordinance. But for a first-time offense, you're very likely to get the ticket cancelled if you show up in court dressed respectably and very politely say "Your honor, I had absolutely no idea this was prohibited, and I won't do it again. I'd really appreciate it if I could be let off with just a warning this time. Paying the fine will be a real hardship for me."
Unless Maryland is unusual, there are no court costs and no need for an attorney to fight a simple parking ticket. Just show up and tell the truth and be respectful.
We got ourselves to blame. Busybodies like those you describe win because we do not pay attention and they do. Can you name all your local officials? Sadly, I can name only a few of them.
What we all need to do, starting with myself, is to take a long look at all the local ordinances and push to get rid of the bad ones. Our city council, township trustees, county commissioners, mayors, and supervisors are all elected officials. They are often unopposed in elections outside of big cities.
In the age of the internet, many of the local ordinances are online. These aren't secrets.
Boy. No kidding. What the heck is with Free Republic lately?
I am all for keeping up the neighborhood and all, but if I OWN the land I should be able to park my car on it anywhere I want.
Some of the comments from people here baffle me.
I think blight and trespassing are also reasons for these laws. If it’s legal to park your car on your own lawn, then it would also be legal to give a friend or guest permission to park on your lawn, and it would also be legal if you didn’t happen to be at home during the entire time the car was parked there. From a practical standpoint, it then becomes impossible to police the problem of people parking their cars on other people’s lawns without permission. In densely populated areas, and in the vicinity of commuter train stations, sports stadiums, etc, this is often a real problem. The only way to keep the neighborhood from descending into chaotic disregard for property rights is to have an ordinance that allows police to ticket to any car found parked on a lawn.
Man, I agree with you completely. Some of the responses here are depressing.
LOL!
It can get more complicated that that. See my previous post re people parking on lawns without permission. I had a similar issue many years ago, with a neighboring property with which I share a driveway. My home is a single family home and the property that shares the driveway is a commercial/residential property with a storefront and 5 apartments, with a parking area adjoining the shared driveway. There was a dreadful crack-dealing bar across the street (long since shut down, I’m happy to say), and the crack dealers, prostitutes and other assorted undesirables had a habit of using this shared driveway, parking in the lot. They were not the sort of people I wanted to be bumping into at night, or having milling around the edge of my property, and they certainly didn’t have permission from the owner or any of the tenants of the adjoining property, to be there. But there’s the rub. I called police on multiple occasions, and there was nothing they could do, because there was no way to prove that the trespassers didn’t have permission from *anybody* associated with this adjoining property. At 2 o’clock in the morning, police weren’t about to start banging on the doors of all 5 apartment tenants, hauling them out of bed to ask if they’d given permission for certain people/cars to park on the property.
Unlike the lawn parking, there was no practical way to deal with this problem, due to the odd configurations of the two properties and shared driveway. And that really sucked for quite a long time. But if these creeps had been thinking of parking on lawns anywhere on the block, an ordinance prohibiting that (and I expect we do have one) would have been a big deterrent, since they would have gotten ticketed promptly, withOUT police officers having to wake up homeowners to get a formal statement that, no, the homeowner had not given anyone permission to park on the lawn.
There's "informal" and "formal" hearings. Informal is no attorney and works like a "Judge Joe Brown" style of arbitration. Formal hears have attorneys.
I’m also a little worried about the state of conservatism here on FR. Property rights are the foundation of our Republic. Lose them (we’re almost there) and everything else goes to hell in the proverbial hand basket.
My husband parked on our lawn not long ago. It was during a windstorm. My next door neighbor, who LOVES code enforcement, keeps sticking vitamin stakes in the grass near her tree. Thus, her tree has grown to weird and ungangly proportions. One of these days it's going to fall over onto my cars.
I wonder if I can get code enforcement to worry about her stupid tree as much as they worry about the height of grass or locations of the trash cans.
I think it depends on the severity of the charge, in the case of traffic tickets, and I’m sure the details vary from state to state. I fought a moving violation in Florida many years ago (driving on the gravel shoulder because there was huge traffic jam and flashing police car lights at the next intersection — thought I was bypassing an acccident scene, but it turned out the whole traffic jam was caused by police stopping people and ticketing them for driving on the shoulder). I don’t remember what the dollar amount of the ticket was, but it certainly wasn’t huge, given the “offense”. Like any ticket I’ve ever seen, there was on option to check off the box that you wanted a hearing, instead of paying the fine. I checked the box, got a letter telling me when and where to show up to tell my side of the story. I showed up, dressed in a conservative suit and with a detailed drawing of the scene, and told the judge my side of the story — judge said “I’m familiar with the intersection” (I could almost hear him thinking “and I’d have driven on the shoulder too”), and cancelled the ticket. The courtroom was processing traffic tickets at the rate of about one every 5 minutes (much faster for the ones where the ticketing officer was a no-show — those were automatic wins for the accused, in about 30 seconds). At least 4 out of 5 were getting off the hook. Repeat offenders for major speeding, running red lights, etc, were the only ones getting told their tickets would stick, or that if they wanted to appeal, they had to go to some higher level proceeding. Few, if any, of the ticketees had lawyers in attendance.
Lived in Michigan for 70 years now....it sucks..especially in winter......:O( too old to move now....Fall is nice but last 3 weeks if we are lucky.
Quite right. I can certainly understand those reasons.
lolz
More info here: PG-Politics
OK, now that is a law that was passed just to give cops something to do between 3:00am and 6:00am (or whatever the hours are) and enrich the city. Like I said, it makes sense here. Enforcing it between September and April only would make even more sense, but let’s not expect too much from government.
Bad as it is, living in Michigan beats not living anywhere else.
Just trying to keep Prince George’s County Maryland from looking like back woods Alabama and also a revenue enhancement plan.
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