Idaho's Property Rights
Having been aware of political methodologies of "taking land" from old family stories about the loss of a silver mine in Colorado in the 1880's. I remember quite well when my family decided to tear down the old beach house on San Francisco's Great Highway and see about building three apartment unit buildings. No matter what plan was presented to the SF Building Inspectors for approval, it was turned down time and time again. The final plan was rejected for the back yards not being big enough. After the great expenses of designs and fees and architects, the family gave up and sold the property.
The friendly real estate agent already had a buyer. Soon we saw our final plan built on the property. The Building Inspector that had rejected our plan but had approved it (the plan we had paid for) for his developer brother. This is pretty much Standard Operating Procedure for San Francisco. What's a family to do?
Being familiar with these petty land-grabs by the greedy, I was shocked to learn of what was happening in South Lake Tahoe. The city government simply condemned many of the motels that had sprung up over the past 100 years and paid them a pittance under the auspices of "eminent domain" , the concept where government can lawfully "take" someone's land by decree, and after paying "fair market value" convert that land to public use. What was happening there was that the city would condemn a motel that netted many hundreds of thousands per year and pay the owners just a couple hundred thousand (less than the actual value of the land, but since the city controls the deck, the owners just got what was dealt to them). Once the city took control and demolished the buildings, they had cozy developers build new office building (of the sort that big corporate execs might like), and then sell the buildings for a profit to these preferred corporations.
I call that theft by government.
When I moved here in 1993, I rented a duplex and a friend helped me find a home I could buy. He lamented that it was in the city of Boise and that the services we both had were more costly for me due to franchise fees, and that I paid almost twice the taxes he did because he lived out in the county. Well, a few years later the city of Boise annexed him and he has to pay a lot more for nothing more.
He fought but little, because, as we all "know", you can't fight city hall. I hated seeing the look of defeat in his eyes. I researched the issue and found that state law requires that when a school district boundary is to be moved, the voters affected must vote on it, this also applies to all other taxing districts such as fire, sewer, mosquito abatement, etc, but state law allows cities alone to annex without asking the people who be affected. For the past couple of years, I have been a regular gladiator in the committees trying to get meaningful annexation reform passed into law. Along the way, I found that there were things I needed to know to play this game, so I returned to college, currently attending Boise State University to complete a degree in Political Science. I now relish crossing swords with those who use the law to undue advantage for some over others for the purposes of profit and control. This past legislative session we lost, the bill by the cities and the developers passed and was signed into law. A court challenge is in process now to determine wether procedures weighted to favor large land owners is legal under the American concept of government. The bill that is now law is obfuscatory in its language, having been written by a gaggle of lawyers, and provides that an owner of 1,000 acres might have 1,000 "votes", but next door, in the sub-division, 1,000 homeowners living on ½ acre plots (total 500 acres) have only 500 "votes" (look up the Feudal System of mediaeval times and note the similarities !). Another issue is wether consent is a real vote, or a protest which can simply be ignored. At any rate the current law, which is one of perhaps 2 or 3 (debatable as to the individual merits of each) in the United States where annexations do not require a vote or affirmative approval of the voters. This new bill 1391 worsens the situation while pretending to address the consent issue. This
issue will not go away, for our failure to defeat this bill and pass a real reform was due to the slowness of our "expanding the scope of conflict", for now that Bonneville county is suffering under annexation land-grabs, as well as other counties, we will organize and we will be back ....with a better plan and more troops and new legislature that understands the meaning of "consent" and "the Will of the People".
For a in-depth report on the annexation wars of the past 3 years, a university paper I wrote for my "Legislative Behavior" class can be seen here.
Political Science paper on Annexation Rights |
We must also note the effects of the EPA and the Federal Government in its excessive demands on property owners. I particularly love the saga of the "scum pond" on Butch Otter's ranch. He had a meandering section of river that had little water and a lot of old garbage (decades worth of old cars and trucks, steel drums, barbed wire and steel beams and other trash), so he used his own bulldozer and scooped out the junk and opened the waterway again to free flowing river water. The EPA took umbrage and told him that had they seen him in the commission of this eco-crime, they could have shot him off
his tractor. Idahoans might have taken a dim view of having their Lieutenant Governor shot off his tractor on his own land while cleaning up garbage. Butch fought and fought and the fine was reduced and reduced till it finally was $30,000 and a letter that instructed him to return the waterway to its previous stagnant state, but please do not return the old cars, trucks, steel drums and beams and barbed wire. What a crock. No wonder that when Butch got easily elected to former Congressman Helen Chenoweth's seat, he asked for and got committee assignments on Resources, Government Reform and
Transportation and is on subcommittees on water on each of these. Perhaps the EPA will be a little less heavy-handed when it deals with Idahoans now that we have someone who has felt their oppression on committees that decide their future.
The issue of Property Rights and takings could go one for pages and pages, suffice it to say that I have successfully fought to get a city to rescind its extraordinary requirements on a small business, citing the Dolan V. Tigard Supreme Court Case. Sometimes the mere threat of a cocked and locked lawyer in a pocket and high visibility case law can make the tyrants back off.
If we, as a nation, become unable to OWN property, we BECOME property ourselves (property of a government that WE are supposed to be in control of).
I shall fight for Private Property Rights at every available opportunity.
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