America


Property Owners Harassed by Heavy-Handed Bureaucrats


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Code enforcers trample on residents’ rights with hefty fines and trumped-up violations. BY ALICE GIORDANO


rom charging $25,000 for permits to build a single-family home to imposing hefty fines on families camping in their


own backyard, zoning laws across the country are trampling on the constitu- tional rights of property owners. “We have regulators very impressed


with their power,” says Austin Wai- sanen, a property law and civil rights attorney with the Pacific Legal Foun- dation.


Waisanen, who has litigated numerous cases involving govern- ment overreach, blames greed, per- sonal agendas, and a lack of regulation of the regulators. Maine Republican gubernatorial candidate Robert Wessels, running on a campaign to stymie the Big Brother mentality in his New England state, cited a code enforcement officer in a local town with a hectoring reputation who also sits on its board of selectmen. “That’s a lot of power,” said Wessels.


Officials, he believes, bank on people not challenging them. That seemed to be the case when


code enforcement officials in the small coastal town of Wiscasset, Maine, sud- denly targeted residents for eviction who had long been living in campers on their own private land. Town zoning officials, citing “life-


saving reasons,” began kicking the residents out of their campers in Jan- uary, leaving them homeless in the dead of winter.


16 NEWSMAX | AUGUST 2025 In Palm Beach County, Florida,


the town of Lantana slapped a prop- erty owner with a whopping $165,000 worth of fines for code violations for such petty things as the tires of her car sometimes touching the grass on her lawn, instead of being completely con- tained to the pavement of her driveway. As part of an out-of-court settle-


ment in another Florida case, the Pasco County Sheriff’s Department admitted using trumped-up zoning violations to


Permits Add 20% to Building Costs


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obert Wessels, a GOP gubernatorial candidate in Maine,


said several contractors have told him that local permitting regulations add an average 20% cost onto building projects. The regulations are also seen as


a contributor to America’s affordable housing crisis. An estimated 1 million Americans


live full time in RVs. The libertarian group The


Advocates for Self-Government believes zoning laws are now being designed to force people to live in expensive houses, because it translates into lots of income for the town coffers. Towns and cities are certainly


anteing up plenty of taxpayer money to enforce cankerous zoning laws. A recent job listing by the city of


San Francisco offered a starting pay of $128,000 for an assistant for the “city’s code enforcement team.”


harass residents they didn’t like. In rural Teton County, Wyoming,


Trey and Shelby Scharp said they were shocked when they were forced to pay a $25,000 “workforce housing fee,” as it was termed by the town, as a condi- tion to build a single-family home on a 5-acre parcel of land they own. The crazy part is that even though


the town claims the fee is intended to subsidize and thus promote afford- able housing, it shot down the cou- ple’s proposal to build rental housing on their property. And so the Scharps, both local tour


guides, were forced to pay a fee to help create affordable housing that the town wouldn’t let them create. Waisanen said town regulators


“seemed to have forgotten” that private property owners have “unenumerated rights” under the Constitution that can- not be subverted by local policy. The Cato Institute, which also takes


on property rights cases, said towns are usurping property owners’ protection rights under the 14th Amendment by arbitrarily levying fines. A commonly cited problem is what


legal analysts call “vagueness ordi- nances.” While Wiscasset officials threatened


to levy property owners living in their campers $100-a-day fines for every day they didn’t comply with the town- imposed eviction, there was no spe- cific ordinance in place against living in them in the first place. Officials justified their actions by


saying campers were not included in the town’s definition of a dwelling. Other seacoast towns like Wells,


Maine, have even gone after property owners for just having RVs parked on their private property or for camping in them for a few days.


FRANCESCO SCATENA©ISTOCK


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