[Loch-Ruadh] friday practice 10-15-04

Sluggy! slugzpam at sbcglobal.net
Thu Oct 14 14:07:05 PDT 2004


On Thu, 2004-10-14 at 12:41, mordikar wrote:

> It would seem
> the city of saginaw has an issue with out trailor being parked beside the
> house. "an investigation was made" yeah right and "we are in code
> violation". 

City of Fort Worth's code says that you cannot park any vehicle directly
on the ground. This apparently includes a non-paved driveway. A friend
of mine had to sell her parents' car, which she had intended to keep
since they've passed away, because there was not enough room in her
driveway for both that car and her daily driver.

As for investigations, Fort Worth also recently required everyone who
put up a carport after such an' such date to retroactively obtain a
permit for it. Get this... they used aerial photographs (such as anyone
can find at http://www.dfwmaps.com) as their first stage investigation.
They found houses looked like they had carports this way and searched
for the permits on the addresses. If there was no permit, then they sent
code enforcement out to see if the house really had a carport and verify
that there was no permit on file. Then they sent letters out to solicit
the permits. It was a cheap permit, but that's not the point. Bear in
mind that these are the lengths they will go to for a cheap permit and
that this is a city embroiled in multiple eminent domain controversies.
What else are they brewin' up?

The short version of my own story is that I went to jail one afternoon
directly due to a code violation in Watauga from a couple of year or so
before. The details are not as interesting as that once sentence,
however. Code enforcement put one of those orange stickers on a car that
I had at the time that was not running. I got the car back in running
order and even sold it, never realizing that the orange sticker was
actually a ticket, not just a warning. Couple years later, I set the
alarm off at work and when the police arrived, I identified myself and
we parted ways. A few blocks down the road, he pulled me over and
informed me that I had a warrant. Turns out it was for failure to appear
in the cause of the orange sticker. They took me to the pokey, where
with some help from my boss (that was a call that was fun to make, BTW)
I paid my $400 fine, got out and headed on home in less than an hour,
the issue hopefully closed.

> Last i heard i was making the house payments, not saginaw, but
> that's beside the point.

Like many invasive government regulations and ordnances, they mean well
in their clumsy bureaucratic way but fail on a practical level to make
much sense. The theory is that keeping your yard neat keeps the
neighborhood neater and thus property values remain higher and they can
collect more taxes. While a portion of these taxes help pay for your
local schools and streets and traffic lights, some of them pay for more
code enforcement droids.

Sluggy!




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