Posted by Jim IL on January 07, 1999 at 01:28:37:
sir, KUDOS to you.
BRAVO!
I didn’t even mind the BRAGGING. You earned it.
Keep up the fight.
New trophy for my mantle; Housing Inspector! - Posted by Daniel Lubell
Posted by Daniel Lubell on January 07, 1999 at 24:40:31:
Well, just thought I would let everybody know, you can beat city hall! In Moline Il, Rick & I contracted to buy a single family home which was going to fall into the housing inspectors “Target area”. It seems the housing inspector had cooked up a plan to inspect EVERY single family home in the area, be it owner occupied or a rental. I publicized this by calling into the local talk radio show and focusing the conversation on the “Nazis” that would soon be coming into everybody’s home and telling them how to live and what they had to fix. This kind of thing tend’s to infuriate people.
Then, I mentioned that we needed to have support at City Hall on Tues, Jan 5 for City Council when they would vote on this. Well, the talk show guy hammered away at this for 4 hours straight (man, am I a fan of that guy!).
All kinds of people called in to talk about their 4th ammendment rights, etc. Next, the guy that is the President of our local landlord association got a letter published in the paper in the opinion section. Finally, last night (the night of the meeting), I called in again to hammer away one more time when I was inside City Hall (on my cell phone), 1/2 hour prior to the meeting. The host of the radio show let me ask for more people to come down to City Hall and I even told everybody where the most convienent parking was.
We had 75 people show up for what was suppossed to be a small meeting, and they were lined up out the door!!! The chairman of the meeting tried to hurry things up and not give anybody a chance to speak. He was going to focus on administrative search warrants, which was the technical side of this mess. He didn’t even want to get into the subject of whether or not they should be invading everybody’s privacy in the first place! I was waiving my hand wildely, and the chairman said “Does this have anything to do specifically with administrative search warrants? If not, we don’t have time to hear from you!” (This is what they were going to vote on, the subject of strengthining these search warrant procedures so they could invade people’s homes more easily.)
I said,
‘you bet!’ I went up to the podium and said
‘Look, you are coming into my home, using an administrative search warrant. Not only that, but an unelected official is deciding to inspect and tell me what I have to do with my own home! Well, I for one am going on record right now as saying you had better get busy and get that warrant, because you are NOT coming into my home’. Then, I turned to the 75 people behined me and said ‘By a show of hands, how many of you will go on record as requiring administrative search warrants to get into your homes?’
At that point, close to all 75 hands went up!!!
I turned back around to the Aldermen and said ‘I hope you are going to get a lot more attorneys to start writing administrative search warrants, because WE ARE NOT GOING TO STAND FOR IT!!!’(I even got to pound the podium, that was fun!)
At this point, I recieved a standing ovation (they couldn’t help it, they were already standing). You could see the aldermen’s faces just drop. After which, they promptly voted to kill the entire program and they even voted to take down their stupid sign encouraging citizen’s to call into the housing inspector and “tattle” on each other.
The only downside is I made the local news which my girlfriend hates, but all in all it was an extremely satisfying experience.
I know what I am about to say will really sound like bragging, and it is, but I want people to know you really CAN fight City Hall (Plus, I want to brag). So, here goes… So far I have killed another, similar proposal in Bettendorf Iowa and in Davenport Iowa I am helping in the process to rewrite much of the rental inspection codes to make them fair to both tenants and landlords. We meet on that once every month.
So, yes you can fight City Hall. Don’t let the bureaucrats get you down. Their heads make nice mantle pieces!!!
-Daniel Lubell
Re: New trophy for my mantle; Housing Inspector! - Posted by Rob FL
Posted by Rob FL on January 07, 1999 at 21:46:51:
You da man! You deserve to brag a little for that kind of work.
Re: New trophy for my mantle; Housing Inspector! - Posted by JHyre in Ohio
Posted by JHyre in Ohio on January 07, 1999 at 06:38:18:
Jim,
Way to go!
John Hyre