Ordinance Violations

Summary of Minimum total of Ordinance Violations

In the spirit of full disclosure, we stopped keeping a detailed account when the county clarified its intent to completely disregard the law. At that time two projects had reached $736000 but we have since estimated the current amount of penalties for one of those projects to be a minimum of$ 840,000. You could easily multiply that by three, and still come short of the actual amount of penalties accumulated by the development performed by the Tyler/Simmons family. A more realistic expression would be exponentially higher, considering one violation entails a $2500 fine per day, for each day the violation continues. Not only did the developer never acknowledged the violation or invest any effort into rectifying the violation, the Zoning Administrator’s refused to enforce state and federal law, which neither nullifies the existence of the violation, nor does it grant any special rights for its violation.

Is the county honoring any statute codified in law?  

When asked if the county is monitoring any of the construction sites for violations, as it should according to its own county ordinance, the Chairman of the County Commissioners responded “We do not have enough resources for that”. Which upon review it appears the opposite is true, how can the county afford not to enforce ordinances. Regardless, the statement says nothing about not refusing to enforce known, and even self admitted violations. From a general survey of the numerous construction sites across the county, it appears the county is not enforcing any of the building or construction statutes codified into law by itself, the state, or even congress. It simply is refusing to enforce any law that would prohibit illegal building practices, but it will enforce any ordinance that it sees fit as to punish political dissenters.

This IS the county’s policy  

The refusal to enforce building and construction statutes is a remnant of old neoconservative political thought. Which mistakenly believes that by promoting the interests of big business over the private liberties of the average citizen, the end result would be a productive and stable economy. The most obvious problem with this is the assumption private liberties are less worthy than the interests of big business. After all, governing the early American colonies before the revolutionary war was “big business” for the crown, and it is due to this inability of private liberties to compete with those of “big business” which we revolted. Thus is the reason our founding father’s labeled these private liberties as inalienable rights, meaning they are inseparable from mankind.

When the prioritization of protecting the private investments of average consumers in location dependent assets are demoted below the interests of big business to increase profitability, the consumer will hesitate to further invest in those location dependent assets in order to cover losses and protect capital. This will in turn reduce the gross domestic product of the area for location dependent assets, and as producers of those goods and services experience less and less demand for their product or service they will have to scale back the rate of production and/or raise prices in order to satisfy costs of remaining in business. This will in turn reduce the amount of capital available for further investment in goods and services.