It was supposed to be a “slice of Americana and of childhood dreams,” says U.S. Army Specialist Mark Grapin, who lives in Fairfax County, Virginia. He’s talking about the treehouse he built for his two sons after returning from his latest tour of duty in Iraq.

What Grapin didn’t expect was that Fairfax County’s zoning board would demand he tear down the treehouse after an anonymous complaint, thus launching the family into an eight-month legal battle.

Grapin went to the local media for help and public outcry turned into an online petition. A neighbor donated trees to cover the treehouse, and the family even received a pro bono lawyer to help win over board members.

Just days before the treehouse was to be torn down, Grapin was able to convince the board to let him keep it on the condition it be removed after five years. Plenty of time, he says, for his sons to enjoy it.

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Ironic that the movement has forced the kind of austerity measures it protested coming from Congress.

From CBS Los Angeles:

City agencies have been ordered to calculate what was spent on the Occupy LA protests.

Repairs to City Hall’s lawn where the Occupy group set up camp on Oct. 1 will require an estimated $400,000. The police action to clear out the encampment on Nov. 30 cost more than $700,000.

Additional expenses are attributed to hauling away debris from the camp, and cleaning up graffiti that defaced City Hall marble walls and trees. (more…)

From the Associated Press:

President Barack Obama and his allies in the Senate promise to press ahead with separate votes on pieces of his failed $447 billion jobs measure despite unanimous opposition from Republicans. But there also are signs of slippage among Democrats and evidence the strategy isn’t working with voters.

Future votes on individual pieces of the measure, however, aren’t likely to fare better than a pared-back jobs measure designed to boost hiring of teachers and first responders that Republicans and a handful of Democrats scuttled on Thursday.

Obama’s revised plan failed on a 50-50 test vote that fell well short of the 60 needed to break a filibuster. Three Democrats abandoned Obama on the vote and two more who voted with the president said they couldn’t support the underlying Obama plan unless it’s changed.

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Steven Malanga in City Journal:

Pensions are an enormous part of the problem. New Haven’s $475 million budget, for instance, is projected to grow by just $4 million this fiscal year, but the city’s pension and health-care costs will rise $12 million, forcing cuts elsewhere. In San Francisco, pensions consume about 14 percent of the budget, and rising retirement bills for city workers accounted for one-third of this year’s $306 million deficit. Pension and health benefits account for 20 percent of the $500 billion that the nation’s nearly 14,000 public school districts spend annually. In a recent National League of Cities survey, nearly 80 percent of municipal finance officers listed rising pension payments as one of their most significant budgetary problems.

Here again, the problem is disproportionately local. Yes, state-sponsored pension funds have accumulated anywhere from $750 billion to $3 trillion in unfunded pension and retiree health-care liabilities, depending on how the calculations are made. A huge portion of those liabilities, however, is actually owed by cities, towns, and school districts. States employ just 5.2 million of the 13 million active workers participating in state-sponsored pension funds; the rest are local employees, often teachers, who work for districts too small to manage their own pensions. Experts agree that pension costs for both states and localities are going to skyrocket. But states currently spend just 4 percent of their budgets on pensions, while many municipalities already spend 15 to 20 percent.

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Two months after 85-year-old Dolores Sherman announced her name would appear on the ballot April 5 as a candidate for a seat on the St. Peters (Mo.) Board of Aldermen, the first-time office seeker posted a video on YouTube containing some stinging accusations and calling for an external investigation of an incident that involved a state trooper visiting her home.

Before viewing that video, however, it would probably be instructive to view the video below that appeared in a Jan. 11 post on this blog. It offers an overview of Sherman’s candidacy announcement Jan. 11.

Now, fast-forward to the video Sherman released March 9, a five-and-a-half-minute effort that highlights her appearance at the Board of Alderman meeting April 22, 2010.

At the popular video-sharing site, the video is accompanied by a lengthy description, an excerpt of which appears below:

This video clip shows that some members of the St. Peters (Mo.) Board of Aldermen didn’t take Dolores Sherman seriously when she spoke during the “Citizen’s Petitions and Comments” of their meeting April 22, 2010. Almost a year later, they might be having second thoughts.

On Jan. 11, 2011, Sherman announced she is running for one of two Ward One seats on the board in the City of St. Peters (Mo.), the city in which she says she was prosecuted more than five years earlier for a crime she didn’t commit.

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Click here for the updated Palatine Village Manager Compensation Analysis.

As additional Freedom of Information Requests (FOIA) are fulfilled, here is the updated analysis of the Palatine Village Manager Compensation as compiled by a local Palatine resident. The estimated total annual compensation has increased to $355,514 (see link above).

The Palatine village manager out-earns every Governor from any of the 50 states!
Source: The Book of States 2010.

Because local governments are not proactively forthcoming regarding payroll, benefits and perks, this analysis is a good-faith estimate. For instance, the FOIA request regarding the managers current employment contract for 2011 was rejected- although contracts from 2006-2010 were fulfilled. FOIA requests regarding gross pay and accumulated sick days were rejected. Although taxpayers have a significant liability into the tens of thousands for both items, we are being told that this is “private information”.

This egregious salary and benefit package is a disgrace and symptomatic of much greater problems in the state of Illinois. At a time municipalities are asking Springfield for more taxpayer dollars saying they are broke, these types of bloated spending has become more and more common throughout the suburbs.

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From The Denver Post:

After spirited debate Monday, Denver’s City Council voted 10-3 to tentatively approve a 6.6 percent raise for the next sitting council and every other elected official — an increase to be delayed for half of their four-year terms.

The city is facing a $100 million budget shortfall for the 2012 budget and has a structural budget problem that, if not addressed, could balloon into a $500 million deficit by 2030.

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Transparency, accountability and limited government are the cornerstone principles of For The Good of Illinois. We encourage citizens to ask their local school districts, municipalities, counties, and other units of local government to show taxpayers exactly where government spends every dime.

Recently, a citizen brought transparency to his hometown of Palatine.

As a private sector executive compensation expert, he did a very professional one-page overview of the village manager’s compensation plan. He discovered that the village manager in Palatine has an unbelievably lucrative employment contract.

PalatineVillageManager

Base salary = $183,700. Total estimated annual compensation = $350,000.

Then, there is the…perquisites. I wasn’t familiar with that word. Here’s what it means: country club membership, health club membership, and luxury car. This contract has $23,000 of perquisites. Sickening.

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Feature story in the alternative newspaper SF Weekly:

In recent years, San Francisco government has passed numerous laws to make us healthier, greener, and — in the city’s eyes — all-around better people. Whether we like it or not. This includes banning the sale of cigarettes in drugstores, and, later, supermarkets; banning plastic bags in large chain stores; banning bottled water in City Hall, and the sale of soft drinks on government property; banning the declawing of cats; making composting mandatory; and forbidding city departments from doing business with companies that were involved in the (pre–Civil War) slave trade, yet haven’t publicly atoned.

The city may yet ban the sale of any pets except fish, and the sale of bottled water during events on public property. Banning foie gras, meanwhile, didn’t catch on, even here. Neither did allowing the city to prosecute anyone who depicts images of animal cruelty if they set foot in San Francisco — essentially the same niche Belgium has carved out for itself with accused war criminals.

San Francisco’s acumen for imposing bans has grown so pronounced that when an anticircumcision zealot began disseminating a petition to criminalize the practice within city limits, observers nationwide didn’t write it off as fringe lunacy but, instead, saw it as just another day at the office in San Francisco.

That ban didn’t make the cut. And San Francisco does not have a monopoly on banning things. But nowhere else can you ban so much with such ease and so little political blowback.

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This post could be entitled, “So many dumb bureaucrats, so little time,” but let’s have some fun and turn it into a contest. Which bone-headed decision by a local government best exemplifies mindless bureaucracy, politically correct nonsense, and government waste?

Contestant Number One is Sgt Brian Albert of the Baltimore County Natural Resources Police, who fined two men $90 each for the vicious, horrible, nasty crime of …(please don’t faint)… rescuing a deer. Yes, your eyes do not deceive you. Two hardened criminals used an inflatable raft to free a helpless animal, but they flouted the law by not wearing life jackets. Since I already did a blog post about a man being fined for rescuing a wounded deer, I guess the moral of the story is that bureaucrats don’t like Bambi.

Contestant Number Two is the Metro Police in Washington, DC, which has decided to harass random travelers by searching their bags before they board the subway. This is akin to the TSA’s mindless bureaucracy – but even worse. There surely are nut-jobs who would like to blow up Americans, but they could do that on a bus, on a crowded street during rush hour, or any other place where a large number of people are gathered. Heck, they can drive a car into a crowd. Good intelligence by the CIA and FBI is the way to stop these crackpots, not empty security theater that makes life more difficult for law-abiding people.

Contestant Number Three is the St. Paul School District in Minnesota, which has turned all schools into “sweet-free zones.” This ban also applies to salty foods, however that is defined, and deals “a blow to booster clubs and parent organizations, too, which won’t be able to sell hot chocolate, doughnuts, candy bars and cookies at school events.” I actually agree with Michelle Obama that American kids are overweight, but I also know that government intervention isn’t going to solve the problem unless we want a police state that bans video games, TVs, computers, and the other technological developments that are responsible for sedentary kids.

Contestant Number Four is Battlefield High School, in Haymarket, VA, which disciplined 10 unrepentant gang members. What did these thugs do to warrant detention? Brace yourself and make sure no children are looking over your shoulders, because these hoodlums belong to a particularly nasty group called the Christmas Sweater Club and they got in trouble for handing out miniature candy canes. One school administrator (Mrs. Grinch?)  explained that “not everyone wants Christmas cheer,” thus turning Jay Leno’s parody into reality.

So who wins the prize? I’m not technologically advanced enough to include a poll with this question, so the only thing we can really conclude is that governments do dumb things. That’s true at the national level, the state level, and the local level.

I just wish I could write like Dave Barry.

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Governor Pawlenty in today’s Wall Street Journal:

When Americans think of organized labor, they might think of images like I saw growing up in a blue-collar meatpacking town: hard hats, work boots, tough conditions and gritty jobs. While I didn’t work in the slaughterhouses, I did become a union member when I worked at a grocery store to help put myself through school. I was grateful for the paycheck and proud of the work I did.

The rise of the labor movement in the early 20th century was a triumph for America’s working class. In an era of deep economic anxiety, unions stood up for hard-working but vulnerable families, protecting them from physical and economic exploitation.

Much has changed. The majority of union members today no longer work in construction, manufacturing or “strong back” jobs. They work for government, which, thanks to President Obama, has become the only booming “industry” left in our economy. Since January 2008 the private sector has lost nearly eight million jobs while local, state and federal governments added 590,000.

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Let’s say you have a knack for cutting hair.  If you live in Florida, guess how many hours of government-mandated instruction you’d be forced to sit through before you can become a barber?

1,200.

That’s right, well over a thousand hours.  Plus, you’d have to pay thousands of dollars to cover the cost of your classes and pass a written exam.  Only then will the government give you a license—that is, permission to cut hair.

Now what happens if you’re already a successful barber but didn’t have a chance to stop working and jump through all the hoops needed to get that license?

Armed government agents could raid your business and handcuff you in front of your clients. Indeed, this is already happening.  Institute for Justice economic-liberty expert Paul Sherman explains:

According to the Orlando Sentinel:

As many as 14 armed Orange County deputies, including narcotics agents, stormed Strictly Skillz barbershop during business hours on a Saturday in August, handcuffing barbers in front of customers during a busy back-to-school weekend.

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Are you a blogger in the city of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania? Do you have Google Adsense or some other sort of low-return ads on your blog? If so expect a letter soon from your friendly city treasurer demanding that you pay a $300 tax on your “money making business.”

For most people that maintain an active blog it is just a hobby. Some people blog daily but most only do so a few times a month. Many bloggers also participate in Google’s advertising program called Adsense but few make much more than $20 or $30 a year from the effort.

But according to the City of Philadelphia, you have a lucrative business one that you need to register with the city and either pay $50 a year tax or a “lifetime” fee of $300 to be allowed to operate.

Naturally the Philly bloggers that have gotten this letter are flabbergasted. None of them were even aware they have a taxable business with their blog. Ah, but the city disagrees.

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You’ve probably heard about eminent domain abuse.  That’s where the government takes your land and hands it over to another private party….one that is more politically connected.

But you may not have heard about civil forfeiture.  And yet, today, it could very well be the most egregious abuse of private property rights in America.

We all know that one of the many beautiful things about the United States is that citizens are innocent until proven guilty.  But civil forfeiture turns that fundamental principle on its head.

This sounds bizarre, but with civil forfeiture, your property is guilty until you prove it innocent.

Consider the case of Margaret Davis.

As a 77-year-old woman living alone with multiple medical problems, Margaret left her Pennsylvania home unlocked so her neighbors could regularly check on her.  One day while the police were chasing alleged drug dealers through her neighborhood, they all ran through Margaret’s house.  The dealers dropped some of their stash on Margaret’s floor, in plain sight.

Instead of apologizing to Margaret for the traumatic experience, the government seized her house.

Under civil forfeiture laws, Margaret’s property—her house—was guilty until she could prove it innocent to get it back.  And that’s not all.  As it turns out, most state and federal laws allow the government to keep the property they take through civil forfeiture.  So authorities have a big incentive to pursue property over justice.

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Today the Institute for Justice filed opening briefs in our fourth case to appear before the U.S. Supreme Court.

IJ’s first trip to the high court came in 2002 and resulted in a landmark victory for school choice.  We also won our second U.S. Supreme Court case, defending the American ideals of economic liberty and unfettered interstate commerce by striking down a ban on the direct shipment of wine.

Our third case changed America forever.  A local government in Connecticut decided to bulldoze an entire neighborhood and hand the land over to a politically connected private developer.  The law was stacked against the property owners in favor of the powerful special interests.  IJ, defending the property owners, lost in a controversial 5-4 ruling.

This was the infamous Kelo case, and it resulted in an explosion of outrage and grassroots activism all across the country.  Ed Morrissey recently wrote at Hot Air that it arguably set “the stage for the all-out eruption of Tea Party activism a few years later.” This epic battle to protect private property rights, ultimately vindicated by grassroots activists just like you, is one that will never be forgotten:

And now, as children nationwide get ready to begin a new school year, the Institute for Justice is defending Arizona’s innovative scholarship tax-credit program before the highest court in the land.

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Should farmers get thrown in jail for 90 days and hit with $1,000 in fines for engaging in free trade?

Unfortunately, that’s the law in Lake Elmo, Minnesota.

And that is why the farmers are fighting back.  Tuesday they rallied [check out the pictures here], coming from around the state to secure their constitutional rights.  Yesterday, the Institute for Justice—the libertarian law firm that defends economic liberty nationwide—took the farmers’ case to federal court.

On December 1, 2009, the city council in Lake Elmo—a rural city just outside St. Paul—decided that it would begin enforcing a law that makes it illegal for farmers to sell products from their own land unless they were grown within Lake Elmo.

The city’s politicians argue that they are protecting Lake Elmo’s rural character.  In fact, they are destroying that character by making it impossible for their farmers to earn an honest living and increasing the likelihood that family farms will fail.

Consider Richard Bergmann.

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From The Hill:

Democrats are set to unveil a new jobs initiative Wednesday that will provide grants to local governments to save or create jobs.

House Education and Labor Committee Chairman George Miller (D-Calif.) will join other lawmakers and mayors to announce a $100 billion program to support jobs initiatives in local governments and municipalities.

“Our goal is to retain or create a million jobs,” Miller said during an appearance on CNBC Wednesday morning. “There’s some very serious concern that the small, good news we’re getting right now on the unemployment figures could be wiped out by what’s going to happen in local governments, if they don’t get some assistance.”
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Showing complete disregard for the free speech rights of small business owners, the City of Dallas bans businesses from putting commercial signs in the upper two-thirds of any window or glass door, and on more than 15 percent of any window or glass door. Only ineffective signs are allowed by the government: tiny signs placed at people’s feet. The law also bans signs that cover more than 25 percent of a building’s façade. Failure to take down the signs means you are at risk to be hit with a fine up to $2,000.

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