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I'm sorry but this is difficult to believe. The site says that it's unlawful to do "minor vehicle repair [...] Using tools not normally found in a residence". If it was just a zoning law, why does it have to include that stipulation? I've seen plenty of people who own tools "not normally found in a residence". It's hard to guess exactly what the authors' intentions were, but it wouldn't be unreasonable for someone to conclude that there were other motives besides just cracking down on illegal auto shops.

Well, the law will be two years old soon. There's one local news article about it where the county's PIO clarified the county's intention [1]. Aside from that, alllllll of these homeowners innocently working on their cars in their own garages and yards around the county and getting hit with hundreds and hundreds of dollars in fines have resulted in... exactly zero other local news coverage that I can find.

Every other search result about this thing is some motoring site where the internet commenters are absolutely certain that this is yet another example of draconian liberal legislative overreach and just nobody can really do anything on their own property anymore and it's all just so unfair...

Again, I'm expressly not defending the law as it's written, but if the letter of every bad law was to be applied equally to everyone in the same instant, there would not be a single free person anywhere in the country. Like all the others, this one is being applied selectively.

[1]: Warning: really obnoxious autoplay videos, because every local news site is on a headlong rush to the bottom of the pit of asshole design. https://www.abc10.com/article/entertainment/television/progr...

> Well, the law will be two years old soon. There's one local news article about it where the county's PIO clarified the county's intention [1]. Aside from that, alllllll of these homeowners innocently working on their cars in their own garages and yards around the county and getting hit with hundreds and hundreds of dollars in fines have resulted in... exactly zero other local news coverage that I can find.

Big cities with traffic problem enact this kind of laws to discourage personal car ownership. Sure, just because now it's not actively reported as enforced doesn't mean it won't be in the future, and it wouldn't be the first time where the enactment and the enforcement of a low separated in time to make the pill easier to swallow.

Exactly. If they have to clarify it in some press release, then they should be amending the ordinance so that it is clear.

Unfortunately, the system is lazy. Politicians don't bother to amend laws when these issues arises, police can use their "professional discretion" to enforce or not enforce a law (which leads to unequal enforcement), and the courts tend to "interpret" laws in ways that don't make sense (partially because of the politicians I mentioned earlier, but also a misapplication of statutory construction rules and lenity).

The idea that giving the authorities the ability to enforce selectively on whom they like is a good thing is honestly bizarre to read. It's the classic preserve of biased prosecution.

EDIT for response since I'm rate-limited. I interpreted the following section:

> Again, I'm expressly not defending the law as it's written, but if the letter of every bad law was to be applied equally to everyone in the same instant, there would not be a single free person anywhere in the country. Like all the others, this one is being applied selectively.

as something akin to "I think the law isn't great, but if any law were applied fairly, we would all be in jail. Fortunately most laws aren't applied fairly"

But I can understand if that was a misinterpretation.

Yeah, I disagree completely with whoever wrote that this was "a good thing". Who was that, anyway?

Not saying this is a good or bad thing, but one way to make laws not be selective is to have mandatory enforcement and mandatory sentencing required for every law. If the law could be interpreted to apply to a situation, then it does apply to a situation in this model. Laws would be very carefully written under this and extremely well specified. With this you could be much more sure that a law is applied as written, whereas at the moment you have to continually look at the results of cases and can't see when people are let off the hook because someone in an authority position is well disposed to the person because they are friends with them or for other reasons. This can happen before a case goes to trial or during the trial.

It's basically unenforceable, if the general public can buy the tools.

The general public can buy all of the equipment and tools they need to open up an unlicensed hair salon in their garage. That doesn't make laws against it unenforceable.

Your defense is a combination of “what about” other poorly written laws and “but it’s not enforced”. I don’t have enough time this morning to explain why these are dangerous and ignorant arguments...

Making laws that target personal liberties in the hopes that they will be selectively applied does not increase justice.

This is a very, very, very naive take.

Laws like this exist to only be enforced as needed to screw people as needed. Of course there is not going to be a big enforcement push because that's not the point. The point is to give busybodies a means to screw their neighbors under color of law.

Are you saying that the law is specifically designed to be selectively applied, with the enforcement authorities more or less arbitrarily deciding what does and what doesn't warrant a crackdown?

But that's exactly the kind of law that tends to be enforced in ways that manifest various majority biases in society.

I dont think this is as strong defense of that law as you think. It still makes fixing car or geeking on car punisheable. It still is absurd limitation of what I would expect to be a freedom.

"but there hasn't been a sweep of the neighborhoods with officers asking to look inside of your garage for uncommon tools."

So now we have another set of laws that can be selectively used against some people, usually against people with little money to defend themselves. When I moved to LA it was the same with marijuana laws. Cops were raiding poor neighborhoods for marijuana while you could walk in almost any well off neighborhood and smell the smoke from far away. But these neighborhoods never got raided.

A law should either get enforced or it should be revoked.

> a cudgel against unlicensed repair shops

A terrible thing in itself.

Why not just require that a car being worked on is registered to an owner at the address?

edit: All good points in response. I'm convinced that there is no point in trying to tune the wording of a bad law.

Because working on a family members or friends car isn’t the same thing as running an unlicensed repair shop.

Because I did oil changes at my grandparents house when I was younger. I didn't live there, but there was space, tooling, help, breakfast, and an excuse to visit afterwards.

"Politicians are idiots, the law should be X" is a trope, but finding a wording that doesn't run afoul of edge cases is very, very, difficult, even before lobbying and perverse incentives make things worse. Note I'm not saying this law was made in good faith, but starting an argument from an assumption of ignorance instead of malice seems more likely to change people's opinion in your favour.

Because "unlicensed shops" is a red herring. They're trying to make life hard on the guy that owns a bunch of beater cars and turns his own wrenches. They're basically saying you have to be rich enough to do it indoors and dodge enforcement or you should GTFO because we don't want you here.