Home owners run afoul of Bush-league laws

0 Comments | Insight on the News, May 13, 2002 | by Sean Paige

Two new criminal classes recently have become evident: those that let their hedges grow high and those that prefer to trim them back. One group stands accused of imperiling public safety; the other of endangering the planet. And both have run afoul of petty totalitarians and environmental inquisitors in local governments for doing with their private property what they see fit. These people apparently are oblivious to ordinances that would seem to have no place in the "free world" following the fall of the Berlin Wall.

In Norfolk, Va., Doug Nicoll faces a year in jail and a $2,500 fine for trimming bushes on his lot without permission from the city's "Wetlands Board." In Palo Alto, Calif., 61-year-old Kay Leibrand was arrested for allowing Xylosma bushes in her yard to grow taller than the 2-foot height limit set by the city. She faces up to six months in the county lockup for her crime. Both parties say they had no idea they were breaking the law when they did, or did not, trim the shrubbery in question. But ignorance of even idiotic laws apparently is no excuse.

Leibrand, who has lived in the same house since 1966 and currently is battling breast cancer, says her hedges buffer a backyard patio and garden area from the noise of autos whistling along the street. She wants to keep them the way they are. But the city of Palo Alto says the bushes obstruct the views of motorists and pedestrians and could result in accidents. "This is about protecting kids who are too small to be seen from being hit by cars," the city attorney has said, shrewdly playing the sympathy-for-children card.

Leibrand says she isn't opposed to public safety or children, just nonsensical laws that are arbitrarily enforced. She is standing her ground on a matter of principle, between weekly treatments for chemotherapy. "I'm not against safety," she told an area newspaper. "[The law] just doesn't make sense. It's not enforced anywhere else." Leibrand has taken her case directly to the people via the Internet by posting photos of other Palo Alto residences where hedges exceed the city's standard but whose owners haven't (yet) been treated like common criminals.

Though Nicoll and his wife, Tammy, had been trimming back the bushes on their Norfolk-area property since they bought the place in 1994, that city's Wetlands Board voted in March to fine the couple $1,000 for "conducting regulated activity without a permit." The Nicolls were convicted in absentia because the city sent a summons to the wrong address. In between coffee breaks, a city environmental-services employee had been spying on the culprits for months, apparently worried that trimming the bushes could kill them, leading to erosion, storm-water runoff and the eventual destruction of the world as we know it.

Calling the Wetlands Board's actions "totally bogus," the Nicolls demanded and eventually will get a hearing before the board, at which they plan to defend themselves against the charge of being ecological outlaws. "If people don't start fighting stuff, we're going to lose every right that we have," said Doug Nicoll.

SEAN PAIGE IS A WRITER FOR Insight.