If you live in Seattle your trash is open season for your government. No warrant needed. No proof needed. If one of the many new inspectors hired decides you have not sorted your trash in an acceptable fashion, you will receive a notice fining you $1.00. Every offense, a fine, every offense no recourse for you to defend the correctness of the inspector’s assessment.
It’s just another city invading your privacy. We can all tell story after story of how we have lost freedoms as the lawyers we hire to run our governments do their lawyer thing and create more and more laws.
Many churches can no longer allow parishioners to bring cakes or casseroles to church functions. Health officers have stopped that. NYC put a size limit on sugared beverages.
Take it down another level to your local subdivision. Many have CC&R’s or local zoning restrictions. We have friends in Arizona who lived in a gated community with a restriction that said you can’t leave a car outside overnight. Not in the street, the driveway. Their son came back to live with them after a divorce in the Midwest until he could get re-settled. They had a two-car garage and now with his car they had to leave it outside. A retired lawyer lived in the subdivision. Every day he walked the streets and noted violations and tuned them in to the CC&R board. It carried a $25 fine for each occurrence. They moved.
So, if you live in Seattle and you don’t want someone picking through your trash you can sue or move. Someone is suing and the just might win since there are issues of privacy violation and due process in their trash laws. At some point in some cities and subdivisions residents become numb and accept whatever intrusions government and minority residents decide to impose. Or, you sue and spend your own money to hold on to something you find dear.
At our last subdivision meeting a gentleman who had just moved to AZ from CA stood and said in CA they had restrictions on leaf blowers. He suggested we put some in the CC&R’s limiting usage on weekends. A tall distinguished gentleman with a Carolina drawl stood and said” this is still America and while I still live in America no sumabitch is going to tell me when I can use my leaf blower”.
I defer to the gentleman from Carolina and say, “no sumabitch is going to paw through my trash and issue me tickets based on their assessment of how well I sorted that trash”. Try it either in IL or AZ or I will sue the pants off you. You people in Seattle are mildewed from too much rain, mildewed brains.
