Who’s the public and who’s the servant?
In 2005, Michael and Chantell Sackett bought a small property in an Idaho residential neighborhood, intending to build a home. Once construction began, the EPA decided without any notice that the plot was a “wetland” because it was near a lake. There is no water on the property…
Even though there are other houses between the Sackett’s one acre lot and the lake, the EPA ordered them to remove the fill and restore the “wetlands” or pay fines of up to $75,000 a day.
So, are American citizens entitled to due process, or is the EPA entitled to act as judge and jury? Yesterday, the U.S. Supreme Court weighed in with a unanimous ruling…
Good ruling.
Too bad it does nothing to mitigate the travesty of the Kelo ruling which is an especially bad precedent given the growing fascist relationship between U.S. government and moneyed industries.
I suspect if it wasn’t an election year and the EPA had real money of it’s own the ruling would have been different and much along the same lines as Kelo.
Maybe they thought it was Sackett’s Harbor?/
The sad thing is it took them 7 years to reach this point, and they STILL have to go to court against the EPA.
How much freedom do people really have if unelected bureaucrats from government agencies can arbitrarily tie you up in court for years, perhaps even decades? How many people are even going to have the resources to fight things like this?
On a somewhat related note – as Thomas Sowell observed – once the government controls health care, how many people are going to feel free to speak out against the government, when they could retaliate by withholding treatment from you or your loved ones?
Mark Steyn summarizes this sort of thing perfectly: “The process is the punishment.”
This case has more to it, I followed it originally because of the US 9th circuit (Corrupt Court),…I would say that the local EPA tried to shake down the folks.. Of course that would be hard to prove, but they were stupid enough to go to the USSC…
The SC ruling may have some devil in the details, the 9th circuit would normally make the folks pay the EPA costs regardless of the outcome. The reason Gore & the scam artists of AGW are not sued is all about the US 9th Circuit..
Time for the EPA to be eliminated, a better way of maintaining standards must be found…Why have all these dick heads in one place?.
You can challenge them at great cost. The EPA should be the ones to prove themselves. Not the other way around. Well, at least you can still fight them even though their using your tax money to do it.
Hoping you die before its resolved.
Back in 2006, Stephen Harper thought property rights were important enough to print it on his campaign literature – haven’t heard about them since.
Thank God we have Tim Hudak standing up for us Landowners here in Ontario…eh?
The travesty will not end until the EPA is required to make full restitution, including damages for the loss of their property for seven years and legal fees. The person responsible for this overreach should be stripped of civil service protection and dismissed.
If that can’t be done, transfer them to Midway Island for seven years. They can protect it in person.
Thank God we have Tim Hudak standing up for us Landowners here in Ontario…eh?
Posted by: Jamie MacMaster at March 23, 2012 8:20 AM”
you are being sarcastic here, right?
tim hudak is a clucking little chipmunk who parodies the party line with no idea how to implement anything let alone something as fundamental as property rights.
Wall government must reform land act
Posted Feb. 17th, 2012 by David Seymour
Brad Wall’s government has a resounding mandate to stamp its mark on Saskatchewan. But majorities come and go and history remembers legislation better than the people who passed it.
Failing to reform the Calvert government’s Planning and Development Act (2007) could become an accidental and pernicious legacy of this government.
The act defines how municipalities define property owners’ rights. Compared to the legislation it re-placed, it raises the requirements for municipalities engaging in land use planning. All municipalities must have an official community plan with mandatory minimum content prepared by a professional community planner.
While it does not directly affect what citizens can do, it changes the way that municipal governments deal with citizens.Over time, this constitutional flavour will make the act pernicious.
Onerous land-use planning disrupts the critical pillar in a modern capitalist society — the balance of risk and responsibility that is inherent in owning property. If you have a higher valued use for a piece of property than the current owner does, then you can pay him enough to surrender it, and try your proposed use.
On the city fringes, developers buy farmland because they think they can get more value from housing than crops. The flipside is that if they get it wrong, they lose money. This balance of risk and reward puts every acre of this province to the best use anyone has for it at any time. It’s what makes countries like Canada rich.
By enforcing mandatory minimum requirements for land-use planning on municipalities, the province has edified a class of people who see only one side of the risk-reward equation.
Professional community planners are able to impose their visions, not only over land they have risked their own money on, but on the entire territory of a municipality.
Saskatoon Speaks and Design Regina is the beginning of municipalities responding to the legislation. For each municipality, the process begins with such high-minded consultations unfolding into official community plans that set out how land in the municipality can be used by the people who own it.
The planners get their way with the land but do not risk losing their own money. Property owners still carry that risk but their freedom to use it as they see fit is further restricted.
All municipalities have plans and restrictions on land use at some level but the Canadian constitution contains the principle of subsidiarity or that decisions should be made at the lowest level of government possible without affecting people in other jurisdictions.
Eventually, the success and failure of each municipality is judged by people and investment voting with their feet.
Anyone who doubts the perniciousness of legislating minimum planning requirements on lower levels of government need only look to New Zealand’s 1991 Resource Management Act. Like the Planning and Development Act, this act was supposed to streamline land-use regulation.
In practice, it has created the conditions for increasingly arduous land use regulation.
The planning profession has grown to fill the role mandated for it by regulation, then grown again as its presence allows it to identify and create further work for itself. Land-use plans get thicker each year and businesspeople complain that they could not build the infrastructure they currently have under today’s rules.
In 20 years, it will be possible to evaluate the success of the Wall government here. One of the most important things it could do now is reduce the mandatory minimum content for municipal land-use planning.
If it does not, it will find itself with an accidental legacy.
Seymour is a senior policy analyst at the Frontier Centre.
Jamie MacMaster
“Back in 2006, Stephen Harper thought property rights were important enough to print it on his campaign literature – haven’t heard about them since.”
Political parties often lose sight of why they were elected in the first place. They start out being critical of the bureaucracy, learn to tolerate it, eventually become part of it. At least that’s how it worked for the Liberals.
Nothing ticks me off worse than calling my local councilor and telling them my road hasn’t been snowplowed a week after a big dump only to have him start making excuses. What I want to hear is how he will get those useless XXXX off their lazy XXXX.
Good one EBD. Great issue. In my ideological perspective, bureaucracy is the antithesis of civil librty. Large government is a symptom of either social dysfunction (people too wretched to look after their own affairs) or ruling class dysfunction (a government/media/academia who do not trust people to look after their own affairs)
In this particular socialist backwater where hillbilly socialism is in vogue, bureaucracy is a make work industry to employ the legions of unemployable humanities majors our universities puke out at an alarming rate. Bureaucracies must show some sign to justify their size so we have an ever expanding bloated bureaucracy creating enormous regulatory regimes so complex and demanding that no one can spend a day without breaking the law per se. Then the bureucrats cash in on this public guilt.
We live in a defacto bureaucratic tyranny – just ask any father who’s kid draws crayon guns, or farmers who sell raw milk, or parents who home school, or people who may burn leaves in their back yard, or comedians who offend perverts.
More proof that paying government employees anything over minimum wage is shooting ourselves in the foot.
RIGHT TO WORK legislation NOW!!!
Obsoiver at 9:53 AM
tim whodat, h3ll, you can cover the whole PROGRESSIVE cons with that description
I love this bit.
“Nina Mendelson, a law professor at the University of Michigan Law School, warns, however, that such challenges could allow corporations to tie up the EPA in litigation.”
And that’s a very good thing. The EPA has gone berserk on a number of files for at least two decades. They badly need to be put on choke-chains.
Yes, CGH, I caught that too. She is worried the EPA might be infringed upon rather that citizens.
Says it all.
They need to end the EPA and The Dept of Education just for starters.
Once again, judicial activism saves the day.
So, enforcing the law as written is judicial activism… how, exactly?
I hope no one thought the little faggot would have an answer.