There must be a hundred-and-one schemes to get rid of the ‘gimp’ in your life. Yes, that’s the word once hurled at my wife, who has multiple sclerosis. The first time I ever heard that word was from my HOA president.
Now, the number one ‘gimp’ in Hollywood, Florida is a lady whose HOA is trying to sue her for being disabled. Yep, we don’t want disabled people ruining our property values, do we?
Larraine Best rides what she calls her ‘trike’. The Summit Towers Homeowners Association says it’s a motorcycle and she clearly has no business parking it at her home, especially in a handicap slot. She has a damaged spinal cord and gets around on crutches, and on her trike.
Lordy, lordy, federal lawyers and Broward County lawyers are now planning to sue Summit Towers on her behalf. The HOA says any such lawsuit would amount to a mockery of truly disabled people. Huh? Whazzat?
ADA lawyers have a nasty habit of always winning lawsuits on behalf of the disabled. And civil suits against HOAs by disabled people are almost always successful.
Citizens of Summit Towers? Plan on going to the bank to withdraw money for the big special assessment that’s coming your way.
I just got an email from the Denver-based Tattered Cover Bookstore that all three branches of the store are going to begin carrying my new book! The Tattered Cover is one of the largest independent bookstores in the country. It’s also nationally famous for winning a First Amendment court case in 2000 against a local police department. Narcotics officers wanted to cruise through records of book purchases by a suspect in a criminal case. The bookstore resisted the warrant on First Amendment grounds.
The cops dragged the Tattered Cover around, national headlines were generated, and the whole mess ended up in the Colorado Supreme Court. The bookstore won. Your private book reading list, thanks to this case, is really your own private book reading list. It was a huge victory in the fight for Constitutional rights.
I guess my book is pretty controversial. But thank God for the nation’s bookstores, one of the few places you’ll actually find folks who know what the Bill of Rights was intended to do.
Oh, by the way, the book purchased by the suspect in the drug case? LOL! It wasn’t a book on making illegal drugs. It turned out to be a book on Japanese calligraphy!
It’s happened in Florida. It has happened in other states. Now Denver, Colorado is the scene of the latest HOA atrocity committed against a struggling homeowner.
The Green Valley Ranch Homeowners Association noticed that Lori Wortham’s front lawn had some brown spots. True, the City of Denver has declared a Stage One drought. True, there are severe watering restrictions on homeowners who put too much water on their lawns.
But a $200 fine for a brown spot? Outrageous, says Wortham. She says she’s tried to put down new grass seed and water, but the brown spots aren’t going away during the record heat wave and drought. And HOA president James Tanner says Wortham has been warned before that she needs to take better care of her lawn. As long as the brown spots remain, the fines will keep coming.
President Tanner says a brown lawn lowers property values for all of Lori Wortham’s neighbors. He doesn’t say anything about how punitive HOA fines wreck the reputation of the entire neighborhood and lower the value of all properties in the HOA. That’s the law of “Unintended Consequences.”
