Officials Sue Couple Who Removed Their Lawn 819
Hugh Pickens writes "The LA Times reports that Orange County officials are locked in a legal battle with a couple accused of violating city ordinances for replacing the grass on their lawn with wood chips and drought-tolerant plants, reducing their water usage from 299,221 gallons in 2007 to 58,348 gallons in 2009. The dispute began two years ago, when Quan and Angelina Ha tore out the grass in their front yard. In drought-plagued Southern California, the couple said, the lush grass had been soaking up tens of thousands of gallons of water — and hundreds of dollars — each year. 'We've got a newborn, so we want to start worrying about her future,' said Quan Ha, an information technology manager for Kelley Blue Book. But city officials told the Has they were violating several city laws that require that 40% of residential yards to be landscaped predominantly with live plants. Last summer, the couple tried to appease the city by building a fence around the yard and planting drought-tolerant greenery — lavender, rosemary, horsetail, and pittosporum, among others. But according to the city, their landscaping still did not comply with city standards. At the end of January, the Has received a letter saying they had been charged with a misdemeanor violation and must appear in court. The couple could face a maximum penalty of six months in jail and a $1,000 fine for their grass-free, eco-friendly landscaping scheme. 'It's just funny that we pay our taxes to the city and the city is now prosecuting us with our own money,' says Quan Ha."
Idiots... the rest of the county is conserving (Score:5, Informative)
Typical California (Score:1, Informative)
When you cross the border into the state you can toss logic, responsibility, decency and common sense in the toilet.
Re:Idiots... the rest of the county is conserving (Score:5, Informative)
Yeah here in Melbourne, Australia we have been short of water for a long time but it was illegal to install a water tank to capture your own rain water. Then literally overnight tanks were not only made legal but encouraged with a subsidy.
Re:They should have... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Dumb Government Abuse of Power (Score:1, Informative)
Personally, I hate lawns and I think they're a big waste of resources. But as a homeowner, it's what keeps the property value going. I already have problems with the neighbors not paying their water bill (shared pipe mess, etc), and the association can't do much else other than give warnings that if they don't pay, then EVERYONE will lose water. We need the help from the city to force them to pay. But that's another story.
If the neighbors have visibly broken windows, doors, or damaged roof, it affects the surrounding property value. That's just the reality of it. Something as large and visible as a dead lawn makes it seem like the house is abandoned. And it's not like the city is saying, "hey keep it green and lush," but only that 40% of the yard must have living plants - it doesn't specify what. That seems like a reasonable request. I'd just plant a cluster of cactuses in the corner. Welp, I think the property value will still go down with this tacky solution, but it would get the city off their backs. However, the neighbors might still complain and pass some oddball ordinance at the next city council meeting, and take effect the next year.
If I could, I'd astroturf my lawn.
Re:I presume... (Score:5, Informative)
I see you've never been to Orange county, home to such places as Irvine where it is illegal to leave your garage door open.
How do you define Irony? (Score:5, Informative)
LA Offers upto a $2000 rebate for ripping up your lawn [latimes.com]
Seems that in June of '09, LA wanted to try to catch up with LasVegas who is paying people to rip up their lawns as well.
the intent of the cash-for-grass program is to reduce the 50 to 90 inches of water routinely applied to turf every year. Drought-tolerant substitutes may require just 15 -- in keeping with L.A.'s average annual rainfall.
For information on the L.A. Department of Water and Power program, call the regional water agency rebate hotline at ..... The recording will say funding for regionwide programs is exhausted, but keep listening. DWP customers can press 3 for more details on their rebate.
Also, here's the link to the SoCal Turf Removal Program. [socalwatersmart.com]
Re:Dumb Government Abuse of Power (Score:2, Informative)
Guess you missed this part from TFS:
Last summer, the couple tried to appease the city by building a fence around the yard and planting drought-tolerant greenery — lavender, rosemary, horsetail, and pittosporum, among others. But according to the city, their landscaping still did not comply with city standards
They tried, the county denied.
Re:electrolytes (Score:3, Informative)
Its got lectrolights
Re:How do you define Irony? (Score:5, Informative)
Yeah, but that's LA county. This is OC. An entirely different demographic. For one example, LA is solidly blue on a political demographic map. OC is bright red.
Re:I presume... (Score:2, Informative)
Wooooooooooooosh!
The point was that OC is pretty freaking conservative.
Re:I presume... (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Also America isn't a Democracy (Score:4, Informative)
Also America isn't a Democracy. It is a Constitutional Federal Republic.
It's still a democracy. Any country where people have a say in how it's run - whether directly, or via representatives - is called a democracy; check any English dictionary. "Republic" just means that there's no hereditary monarch, really.
This word had the narrow meaning that you ascribe to it 1) only in US; 2) a long time ago.
While there are strong Democratic traditions, it was designed specifically so that there isn't a tyranny of the majority (at least hopefully not).
For the fun of it, I had once calculated just how many people would it take to pass a constitutional amendment in US (= can do anything, supercedes any law, no limits whatsoever), going by the existing rules. All you really need is the majority in 3/4 of all states (first to raise the issue, and then to get it passed in the parliament). Given that state population is very unequal, if small states gang up, it's actually possible to amend the constitution with only slightly less than 1/3 of all people in the country actually backing it - and it would be legally binding on the other 2/3.
I guess that makes it "tyranny of the minority"? ~
Re:grass-free and eco-friendly landscaping scheme (Score:4, Informative)
By not maintaining grass they are only worsening region's drough issues.
Importing water and evaporating it (which is what a lawn does) is an ineffective strategy in desert regions. The slightly more humid air will be blown away.
Besides the ocean is right next door in this case. Air humidity measured in g/m3 must be quite high, even though the relative humidity is low.
Re:Idiots... the rest of the county is conserving (Score:4, Informative)
In Colorado (USofA), it is still illegal.
The owners of the downstream water rights also own the rainwater that feeds those streams.
http://www.gazette.com/articles/water-55602-rain-bill.html [gazette.com]
Re:I presume... (Score:5, Informative)
I'm trying to figure out why they needed 58,000 gallons to water woodchips though.
I think that was their total water usage, inside the house and out.
Re:I presume... (Score:3, Informative)
xenoscaping
Don't you mean xeriscaping? [wikipedia.org]
Re:Dumb Government Abuse of Power (Score:3, Informative)
After Somalia's former government collapsed, it didn't take long for warlords to consolidate power
sigh. You do realize that the worlds biggest warlord [nytimes.com] was behind the Somali gov "collapse" and for several years now has been illegally invading the country [antiwar.com] on the sly.
At first glance you may think that the US invasion will be a good thing for Somalia... but then the horrific details [independent.co.uk] of the methods used [bbc.co.uk] might give pause [wikipedia.org] to that romanticized "It'll be good for 'em" notion of war and invasion.
. Of course, It's all about oil, again [google.com]. Won't someone invent a replacement already.
US politics background (Score:5, Informative)
LA is solidly blue on a political demographic map. OC is bright red.
An infomercial to those inexperienced in USA politics: blue is to the left of red in the political palette (Democrats=blue vs. Republicans=red). And it's not because they place the communist party mirrored relative to the rest of the world ^_^
See also "Hey, it's the same guy controlling both the puppets!"
Re:Dumb Government Abuse of Power (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Fire hazard (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Leftists (Score:5, Informative)
Outside the Anglo-Saxon world, liberal actually means right-wing. The economic and political doctrines are the same but the liberals don't care so much about religion and family values and advocate personal liberty on those matters.
And then there are the Communists, Socialists and Social Democrats that we consider left-wing, but those don't exist in the USA.
Since the Conservative Revolution in the 80s we've had most major political parties converting to liberalism in Europe. This means less regulations (for corporations), less taxation (for corporations), less government (translation: less social spending), privatisation of public services, etc.
In short, the common people pay more taxes and receive less from the State, the corporations and the ultra-rich are free to fuck everybody in the ass and make all the money they want.
Funny thing, everybody talks about the government expense these days. It's like the Devil itself. But the current free-market doctrine does nothing then making it worse and worse. As an example, the government builds a new public hospital, then gives it to a private corporation for management because "private is more efficient". The service is worse, the costs (supported by the State) are huge, but they move on as if this was a good idea. The same for everything you can imagine, from schools to public transportation, to roads. All the right wing pundits on TV and papers (they're all right wing, anyway) bitch and bitch and bitch about taxation and government spending, but they all defend this absurd model of the government handing millions to privates for (mis) managing public services and facilities. It's pretty clear to somebody owning a brain that this is a doomed model, but it's the standard in the Western world, nowadays.
Re:Idiots... the rest of the county is conserving (Score:3, Informative)
I found this one:
Twenty years ago it was illegal to install a rainwater tank in Sydney. Every kilolitre a household collected from their roof represented a loss to the water authority. [74.125.155.132]
And I am pretty sure the situation was the same in Melbourne.
Re:I presume... (Score:2, Informative)
I work for a utilities company in the Netherlands(relatively cold, very few private swimming pools etc.) and as a rule of thumb we assume 50 cubic meters of water per member of a household, so 200 sounds very plausible.
Not sure I want know how you manage with less than 66 om a 4 person household...1 bathtub that everyone gets to use in turn?
Re:I presume... (Score:1, Informative)
Re:On the benefits of communism (Score:1, Informative)
Except, you seem to be forgetting the selfishness of the American people. Specifically the ones that scream "That's SOCIALIST" the loudest.
They refuse to even consider helping someone else, often posting such gibberish as "free market" and "let them find their own way", as a means to justify their desire to recreate indentured servitude.
And they answer the other issues, such as teenage pregnancy, crime rate, etc, with more and more draconian laws as a means to force others to their will.
Remember....a poor, uneducated man will do the same job as an intelligent 'Middle American' but for half the cost. And money isn't just everything...it's the ONLY thing.
Re:Idiots... the rest of the county is conserving (Score:1, Informative)
What is the reason for forbidding collecting the rain water?
Politics of who owns the water resources, control of catchment areas (ie: valleys and plains that run into rivers).
All of this stuff is enormously important when, on average, there is only just enough water to sustain agriculture OR a river (but some years its neither)
Google the "Murray-Darling System"
(oh, and considering that the last time I was in LA the water came from a big pipe that went across a border...)
Re:How do you define Irony? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:It's their lawn (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Oddly enough, look at the complaints of this (Score:3, Informative)
Certain things that I might do affect your property. If I start Fuzzyfuzzyfungus' Quality Mycotoxin Smelter(come to us for all your cyberpunk vengance needs!) next to your house, your property will be directly affected. Within a few years, your kids will have some exotic flavor of cancer, and EPA dudes in moonsuits will be scraping off your topsoil for incineration. I am causing your property(and, in this example, you) direct damage for fun and/or profit. It isn't really different, ethically speaking, than my breaking into your store and stealing or smashing your merchandise.
Other things that I might do affect your property value. If my taste in yard decoration runs toward bestiality-themed lawn gnomes, the market value of your property will likely fall substantially; but I will not have altered your property itself one iota. Here I am doing you no direct harm, I'm just altering market conditions in a way that happens to reduce the value of your holdings. The analogy would be my introducing a new product X that is shinier and cooler than your product Y, forcing you to liquidate your stock on Woot.com at a substantial loss.
The forecast effects of global warming pretty much fall into the first category. If sea levels rise and your beachfront property becomes a tidal marsh, your property has been directly affected. If changes in precipitation patterns turn your farm into a dust bowl, you've been directly affected.
Now, in practice, this sharp distinction is not nearly as useful as it sounds. Indirect damage hurts, just like direct damage does, and(in the vast majority of cases) people set up society in part to ensure at least some measure of security for themselves. Being vulnerable to substantial indirect harm at the drop of a hat is a form of insecurity. For this reason, virtually all societies regulate indirect harm to some degree(either through law, social convention, or both). However, while it increases personal security, regulation of indirect harm is a direct attack on property rights and(all too frequently) can take the form of anticompetitive pro-incumbent measures.
(Incidentally, this is the part of libertarianism that I find deeply problematic on a theoretical level, and the thing that has caused me to be a great deal more skeptical of it than I used to be. The notion that the state should exist merely to protect its members from aggression against their persons and property by others sounds really simple and elegant. However, because of this uneasy matter of direct and indirect harms, as well as direct and indirect bonuses which are equally tricky though probably not as morally urgent, it gets really hairy in practice. Does the state protect only against direct harm? Are there any indirect harms sufficiently harmful that the state should protect me from them? If so, what criterion is used to distinguish them? Are there any direct harms modest enough that I don't need the consent of everyone affected in order to inflict them? If so, where and how do you draw the line? If not, how "free" can I be when I'm not allowed to make any noise that travels off my property without the express consent of anybody whose sleep might be disturbed by it? That would be pretty onerous. In the end, while libertarian ideals are a valuable protection against certain obvious abuses, I'm not sure that they actually tell you anything useful about all these little edge cases, and the edge cases are where most of life occurs. In practice, you pretty much fall back on a mixture of tradition, "common sense", and majoritarian standards setting, whether it be through a public sector mechanism like zoning, or a private sector mechanism like HOAs.)
Re:Dumb Government Abuse of Power (Score:3, Informative)
Are you insane?
I'll be shortly "buying" a house myself. The monthly cost of the property tax on it is equal to 80-90% of the monthly cost of the mortgage! Property tax is practically DOUBLING my monthly out-of-pocket expense for "owning" the home. If anything, the GP's property tax amount is too low to reflect reality in many places!
Re:Dumb Government Abuse of Power (Score:4, Informative)
to the jury (I will not convict the white man for marrying a black woman no matter what the law says),
That's called Jury nullification [wikipedia.org], and jurors are rarely informed of their right not to convict. I've read about an instance or two where judges specifically inform juries that they cannot do this (although this is really, really illegal)
Re:Dumb Government Abuse of Power (Score:1, Informative)
"You do realize that the worlds biggest warlord [nytimes.com] was behind the Somali gov "collapse""
Are you freaking kidding me?
Somalia has been without a national government since 1991 (end of Barre's dictatorship) and the year generally given that the government went down. GW Bush was sworn-in in 2001.
Even the best attempts to restore a national government went to shit in 1996, 5 years before "the worlds[sic] biggest warlord" noted in the NY Time citation you gave, which in itself was pretty crappy opinion peace that, in typical fashion, left out context to get to the point it wanted to fashion and prove, not find what the truth was.
One of the phrackin reasons we are in the region isn't oil. There's oil everywhere people, yet if you mention it as a reason, it's like people all nod and agree that's THE reason. It's the downfall of former Soviet satellite states, which Ethiopia was one, and Somalia had been years prior (Soviets ended support to Somalia due to the conflict). Second, Islamists had been moving into what had been a relatively peaceful Somalia. Even the NY Times piece, which is a complete piece of shit, indirectly agrees they are (and were) there.
In 2006, there was an attempt at a transitional government, but that was largely a complete farce and, something chose to gloss over, the coalition and the northern sector were filled Islamists with al Quada ties. Funny you didn't mention that. There was damn good and clear reason NOT for that government to form, esp. considering that PRIOR to that transitional government, Somalia HAD BEEN STABLE and nearly peaceful despite having no national government of any substance.
Your 2nd citation firmly backs this. It even cites Somalia's clan leaders as leaders in suspected terrorist rings, and you're seriously using the article to try to back your claims? Are you batshit? Also, considering war itself is horrific, I see nothing substantial in that article that supports the methods used as unusual outlandish, particular in context of what had been going on the region for almost 20 years. And clearly, the reason the US became indirectly involved was because of the Islamists backing the clans and warlords of the area to fight. Don't simply blame the US; they made the first move when other Islamist countries started pushing out the extremist groups.
"Of course, It's all about oil, again [google.com]. Won't someone invent a replacement already."
It's called nuclear, and I bet someone like you complained about that too as evil.
And I can guarantee that the people who invent a replacement won't be you or a greenie, because you don't have the mental capacity or will to They gain too much power from complaining.
And, well, like hell oil is the excuse. There are plenty of other destabilized regions of the world that have oil that we aren't involved in. Somalia has been unstable since it's inception in the 1960s, so I haven't a clue WTF oil had to do with their conflicts back then. But hey, mention oil, and keep mentioning it, so people can simply write you off. What scares me is how highly moderated your post was, despite being so inaccurate.
Re:Dumb Government Abuse of Power (Score:3, Informative)
The US is so far down the track towards autocracy that warning about the dangers of too weak a government is like warning a man who is dying from dehydration in the desert of the dangers of drowning if he's not careful when approaching an oasis.
You realize "autocracy" [wikipedia.org] means one person has all the power, right? In what parallel universe does the congress, courts and the voluntary military cede all of their power to (presumably) President Obama? Did you mean "authoritarian"? That's were the govt ignores the will of the general public and does whatever it wants. If so, I would suggest that you don't really understand US politics. Our biggest problem right now is that politicians are far too responsive to the whims of the people. To wit, the Dems were riding high last year, but descended into a state of self-destructive panic after a single special election that didn't go their way.
And how does this compare to an actual authoritarian govt like China or Russia? People are regularly beaten, arrested and never heard from again (and that's just for sending emails calling for democracy). In Russia, journalists are publicly assassinated for exposing govt misconduct/corruption. By contrast, last August people in the US were carrying automatic weapons and burning the president in effigy outside - of all things - town hall meetings about healthcare reform. And what was the govt reaction? Nothing. And rightly so. (Though I don't agree with allowing people to wield assault weapons anywhere but in the armed services).
I would suggest that you have a look at what the world is really like before you puff up your chest and spout ignorant nonsense.
Re:Dumb Government Abuse of Power (Score:3, Informative)
You didn't look at the picture in the article did you?
They have a big dead lawn with 6 plants planted between a fence and the sidewalk. It's the most god awfull thing I've ever seen and I'm a HUGE fan of Xeroscaping. They didn't Xeroscape, they let the lawn die then planted half a dozen plants along the sidewalk, in fact the bare dirt behind the fence is going to be a dust hazzard in the summer. They could have easily Xeroscaped and hit the 40% plant rule. Try opening the article and looking at the picture.