Dumb Homeowners Wanted View; Now Face $1.6 Million Fine and Their Houses Might Slide Down A Hill

Homeowners face huge fines for cutting down trees
on city owned land to improve the views. Plus, cutting the trees
has increased the risk of landslides that could wreck these homes.   

Everybody wants a million dollar view.

Especially if its from their million dollar house.  

Some people in a West Seattle, Washington neighborhood cut down about 150 big leaf maple trees and Scouler willows because the vegetation was blocking their spectacular views.

Here's the problem: The trees were not on their property. It was on city land. And nobody got permission to cut down the trees, says The Stranger,  a Seattle area alternative paper. (and a very good one!)

Now the city has filed two lawsuits in King County, Washington Superior Court, seeking $1.6 million in damages.

Ouch.

A bigger ouch, according to The Stranger, is why the city planted the trees in the first place. The steep hill on which the trees were growing is prone to landslides. The city figured, correctly, that the trees' roots would help hold the hillside in place.

Now that the trees are gone, there's an increased danger that the hillside, and the houses owned by the people who wanted the views, will slide down the hill during any of Seattle's notoriously rainy winters.

At least before the houses slide down the hill and/or the homeowners are bankrupted by the lawsuits against them, they can at least enjoy their spectacular views of Puget Sound and downtown Seattle.

Still don't think it was worth it, though.

The Stranger also reports that lots of people are doing incredibly stupid things with trees to get better views from the hilly Seattle area.    

Ugly, dangerous regrowth on a
tree that had been "topped" to improve views

One thing their doing is topping trees, which means lopping off the branches of a tree to make it much shorter than it was.

This idea of topping a tree always backfires spectacularly. You could kill the tree, or if not, cause all kinds of other problems.

In part because the trees still have a great big root system, new branches come right back and grow back more quickly and much thicker, meaning the view would soon be even more blocked than before the tree topping.

Trees that has been topped are also less stable. The new branches are weaker, the extra foliage is heavier, so the formerly topped trees are more likely to topple over onto nearby houses during storms.

Well, that's one way to improve your view. If a tree falls through your roof, you'll have a nice view of the sky from your living room, right?

Fighting Local Laws And Prosecutors Who Still Want To Draw Blood From Stones

Guess what? If you throw somebody in jail for
not paying a fine, they aren't going to earn the money
to pay the fine while behind bars.
You's think that would be obvious.  

You'd think they wouldn't have to do this, but the U.S. Justice Department had to remind some state and local governments that it's probably unconstitutional to jail people who can't pay their fines.

Debtor prisons were outlawed many, many years ago, and sending people to prison for an inability to pay fines more often than not violates federal law.

I'm not quite sure how jailing somebody would make them pay fines anyway. You can't go out and get a job to pay your fines if you're sitting in jail.

Maybe the jurisdictions that do this kind of thing believe that if you threaten somebody with fines, they'll get off their lazy ass and get a job.

Might work in theory, but if the person in question hasn't any job skills, or nobody will hire him or her because of a criminal record, or they're disabled, or there are simply no jobs to be had locally, I have no idea how these people would make money.

Of course, we have to draw the distinction between people who can't pay and people who won't pay.

I'm sure there are people who just refuse to pay fines, and you can jail that type of person. But shouldn't someone make a determination about whether they can pay?

The Department of Justice letter was prompted in part by Ferguson, Missouri, which, as we all know, isn't exactly a shining example of racial harmony. There's classism at work here, too.

The DOJ said the Ferguson municipal court "does not act as a neutral arbiter of the law." and "primarily uses it judicial authority as the means to compel the payment of fines and fees that advance the city's financial interests"

That ,the DOJ said, violats the Fourteenth Amendment's due process and equal protection requirements.

And, unfortunately, Ferguson was far from the only municipality pulling this stunt.

The DOJ knows this. As noted in the Washington Post, Lisa Foster and Vanita Gupta, both officials with the department wrote in a letter that went out to all 50 state judicial systems:

"Individuals may confront escalating debt; face repeated, unnecessary incarceration for nonpayment despite posing no danger to the community; lose their jobs and become trapped in cycles of poverty that can be nearly impossible to escape. .......

Furthermore, in addition to being  unlawful, to the extent that these practices are geared not toward addressing public safety, but rather toward raising revenue, they can cast doubt on the impartiality of the tribunal and erode trust between local governments and their consitituents."

There are alternatives to incarcerating people who can't pay their fines, but those aren't revenue generators. You can extend the time period during which they can pay the debt, make the take traffic or public safety classes or do community service.

You want to hold people responsible, after all, but it's amazing that trying to make people do the impossible is well, impossible.  

The insidious thing, at least from the perspective of those of us who are able to pay our fines when we incur them, is that, as the DOJ letter notes, we lose confidence in the wisdom and fairness of the legal system.

That would only encourage more people to break laws. Why obey laws imposed on us by stupid, corrupt people? goes the thinking.

But to some people, I guess if you perceive somebody as a freeloader, you make it impossible for them to recover. Not sure what this accomplishes, but I'm sure it makes the people who make these laws, and support them, feel good.

Meanwhile, in Georgia, lawmakers there finally repealed a law that prevented people who were convicted of drug offenses to ever receive food assistance again.

Yeah, whoever came up with the original idea is brilliant. When they get out of jail and are trying to get back on their feet, let's cut off their access to food so that they steal and go back to jail at taxpayer expense.

Um, Yay?

The Georgia rule change is reasonable enough. You can get food assistance after jail if you are eligible, if you don't commit a new crime and if you fully comply with any probation restrictions you have.

Makes sense to me.

What doesn't make sense is there are still six states that ban food assistance for drug offenders, even if those offenses took place many years ago.