What? Just how out of control has Jim Starbird, our city manager, or the five members of our elected City Council, allowed faceless bureaucrats to dominate the city of Glendale?
More than a third of $1 million as a penalty for allegedly trimming trees without a permit? The city could build a public swimming pool for this amount of money.
Put this in context: In California, if you intentionally write a bad check, you can face treble damages of the face amount, but no more than $1,500 as a felony [California Civil Code, Section 1719 (a)(2)]. The 1998 “Deadbeat Parents Punishment Act” defines as a felony the willful failure of a responsible parent to provide for support of his or her minor child. The punishment? Up to a $10,000 fine.
A fine of a third of a million bucks for “illegally” pruning 13 trees? Has this city really gone this nuts?
How about requiring the Collards to now pay the normal permit fee for tree-trimming, plus $100 added assessment as a penalty? I will pay the extra hundred bucks.
Whoever the city of Glendale’s “arborist” is should be required to: a) apologize; b) be fired; and c) go climb a tree.
To Starbird and five elected City Council members: you do not hold office by virtue of trees, but by the will of Glendale citizens, taxpayers and homeowners. Do you get the picture?
If not, we’ll frame it in oak or sycamore.
I’ve never met the Collards, nor have been in their home, nor seen their trees.
But I do recall the maxim of ancient Roman law, in Latin: “ipse leges cupiunt ut jure regantur”: “. . . the laws themselves require that they should be governed by right.”
ALLEN BRANDSTATER
Glendale
