Court upholds $573k penalty against CA homeowner who fixed cars in backyard | Hacker News Reader

Court upholds $573k penalty against CA homeowner who fixed cars in backyard

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58 pointsfortran7798 comments

This article is exceedingly [and I feel intentionally] misleading. The dude has accumulated years of fines and penalties, as a result of failing to respond to complaints from the neighborhood. His argument is not that he isn't violating any law, it's that the law literally does not apply to him.

The city actually responded in a blog post: https://sacramentocityexpress.com/2022/04/19/city-corrects-m...

He has lost his defense in part because he was defending himself (eg idiot lawyer), presumably the reason he was defending himself is that no attorney would willing take up his case, as his argument isn't the "fees are excessive". His argument is that the law does not apply to him at all.

For example: 'In court filings, Altstatt has argued that it “has not been proved … that any constitution operates on (him),”', etc

The city didn't seek out ordinance violations, the city started getting continuing complaints from the guys neighbors. The city also claims to have offered a lot of help to deal with the issues. When it did fine him, his appeals were similar to the above insanity.

Yeah, sovereign citizen bs doesn't seem to go very far in the court system. "You have no power over me", seems to be met with "here's exactly how much power we have over you".

Is it plausible that he could have sought and achieved a stay on the fines being accumulated?

There's a city appeals process that presumably he ignored entirely, since his current argument is that city and state laws don't apply to him at all, sovereign citizen style.

Why would he plan to appeal to the US Supreme Court then?

Sovereign citizen beliefs are rarely coherent enough to even ask that kind of question.

Yeah - so the fair thing to do is to make him homeless when he is 80, right? Dude, does it ever occur to you that some rules are wrong and humans making decisions might be wrong? You are responding to the wrong sentiment.

What the city wants is the fair thing, it wants him to clean up his property, its method to do that is to issue citations, and charge penalties for failing to do so. It has said, even today, that it wants to work with him to get a reasonable solution. The headline grabbing fine is the result of a judge saying, your appeal is not valid, therefore you owe the default penalty. $250/day fine for 8 years.

What he wants is to not have the law apply to him, and that's his defense in court, which leads to his "appeal" getting shut down. Which means the ruling just says "you owe the fines". That's how the law works.

The city offers many ways to work through these things before you get fined, and offers many ways to make fines manageable.

But none of that works, if the person is literally refusing to accept that the law applies to him.

I am unsure what you think the correct response is?

The city has said it wants to work with him. The city has been saying that since 2014.

What you seem to be saying is that people should simply be able to say the law does not apply to them, and then simply not follow the law? In response to a a traffic fine, should you simply be allowed to ignore it indefinitely?

If he really can't afford it, that's what bankruptcy (and its exemptions like a personal home) is for, though given how much he's ignored for that eight years it might take a court-appointed attorney to do it for him.

Fines may be attached to the property, not the person, so bankruptcy may not remove the claim.

What’s your point? Do you think justice is being served here? Do you think this is a fair outcome? Do you think this is indicative of a highly functional society?

In a functional society, he would have been prevented from being such a nuisance that he accumulated half a million dollars in fines.

How though?

By enforcing the laws and the penalties proscribed therein.

In case anyone was wondering how that penalty came to be:

  He still owes $573,000 in code violations — which accumulated over years with penalties of $250 per day.

Zoning laws are stupid as hell, it prevents upward movement of the middle-class because in order to afford to rent a space to do business in the approved locations in California, you must be a millionaire. Him doing work in his backyard wasn't hurting anyone. If people can work remotely from the comfort of their own home, he should be able to also.

As noted the city, the complaints from his neighbors include rat infestations, which suggests less 'work' and more 'hoarding'.

Rat infestation is such a subjective term.

Rats are literally everywhere.

Right? If you've never lived on a farm you don't know what rats are.

The wort thing is, if you can kill the rats in your barn, you create a power vacuum for the rats around you to invade.

It's a maddening problem.

"Rat infestation" is a subjective term, but multiple neighbors complaining enough about rats for fines to stack up indefinitely isn't a subjective phenomenon.

Not defending this guy but NIMBY-types tend to attribute all negative things that occur in an area to the “black sheep” they don’t want around.

Not defending NIMBYs or YIMBYs but lumping this case under the anti-NIMBY tent is really stretching the meaning of YIMBY.

I agree over-regulation sucks but let me give you a counter example.

A friend of mine who was very poor (single mother of 3, blah blah blah, lots of bad choices mixed in there). She took her broken car to a local "good guy" who ran a repair shop out of his house. He was a veteran, single father which he traded on heavily-- but he had no idea what he was doing. He broke every law there was, from waste disposal to licensing to code/zoning to required practices for mechanics (such as written estimates).

So my friend hasn't had her car for months and this person can't fix it, and he is running advertisements on craigslist to sell it. I call him up and say, "You've failed to fix the car, whats your time worth on this one?" He hems and haws, saying he's put thousands into it (and hasn't fixed the problem). I tell him "not my concern, I'll fix the car myself, what do you want?"

He then threatened me mentioning that he was an ex-marine. I told him I didn't care, that I would be presenting all of this to the police in the morning and having him arrested for conversion if at all possible. His tune suddenly changed, and $80 would be acceptable for services. He immediately called my friend who owned the car and tried to extort her for a few hundred dollars.

I eventually got the car, I recognized the symptoms immediately-- bad crank shaft sensor-- keep in mind, I'm a software engineer. I took it to a trusted shop and the whole thing was resolved or $250 and in 4 hours. He'd been trying to diagnose it for 3 months. Replacing parts in the car because he didn't know wtf he was doing, and then trying to charge the customer for his ignorance, and trying to extort them, and trying to defraud them.

I turned him in to every agency in California that enforces these things, and he was forced to at least obey the law, which meant getting a shop.

I'd love to say this all ended up well, but the antagonist in the story abruptly died. The poor SOB had a heart attack and that was that. I send a few hundred bucks a year to his kids. The real victims in all of this.

Stories like this are why we have regulations.

This case has nothing to do with zoning laws.

I keep seeing comments to the effect that this poor duffer was just fixing his car - but that is disingenuous. If he fixed these things they wouldn’t be there.

This is simply a case of an obstinate hoarder complaining about being called out (fined) and then dragging out compliance while fines piled up.

The fact that he’s 83 is immaterial- he was 75 when first cited.

According to court documents he was also hoarding

-generator

-propane tank

-fruit that had fallen off his orange and grapefruit trees

"The appeals court ruling notes Altstatt contested the city’s code enforcement actions that year. The city sued him in 2015, and he has battled the city in court since then, recently acting as his own attorney." (emphasis mine)

So he has an idiot for a lawyer. No wonder he lost.

You're getting downvoted because of the harsh language, but you're right. The defendant brought a banana to a gun fight. Downvoters, please read the actual ruling[1]. He didn't even seem to understand the basics of defending oneself in court, filing motions in the wrong order, making arguments without evidence, and so on. What he should have done was 1. stop doing whatever it is he was accused of until the case cleared up, so fines stopped accruing, and 2. hired a competent attorney to defend him. He didn't do either of these and instead winged it in court complaining about how unfair everything was.

I am totally on his side, too. It's ridiculous that you can't work on cars in your backyard. But he did everything wrong in his interactions with the State.

If $500K was on the line, would you just yolo it and act as your own attorney?

1: https://www.courts.ca.gov/opinions/nonpub/C092141.PDF

idoits are the people in gov who charged him for hacking / pursuing his hobbies in his property.

As noted in the city's response, the guy's hobbies were playing host to rat nests bad enough to affect the neighbors.

It’s only hacking if you do something with it. Otherwise it is just hoarding.

Never, ever, ever, ever, ever act as your own attorney.

While I think people should have much wider freedom in what they do on their property, this is a terrible example case.

> A neighbor complained, and the city cited him, claiming all the vehicles appeared to be inoperable. It also issued violations for other backyard items — car parts, generators, propane tanks and fruit that had fallen off his orange and grapefruit trees.

Cited for fruit that fell off of your own trees into your own yard. Absolute insanity.

The city has noted complaints from neighbors about rat infestations. I feel like that puts 'leaving fruit lying around' in a different light.

What a world we live in. Sometimes I wonder how these sorts of things get put into law and not a single person at any point thought "maybe this is stupid?"

Only way I could see this being a sensible thing, for limit the attraction of wild life into cities.

Insanity. How on earth can anyone, let alone a judge with a law degree, think that this is at all reasonable (precedent or not). California really needs to clean house and get some fresh perspective in its legal system. Sidenote: I really do wish the US followed the doctrine of abiding by the "spirit of the law" rather than the "letter of the law" in trivial civil determinations such as this.

It didn't randomly come out of the blue. He ignored city fines and various court judgements for 8+ years. Of course the penalties are going to add up.

Frankly, I don't see how it justifies the sum. The guy can be a stubborn fool, and $573000 is still a crazy amount

So then no one should ever pay any fines for anything, and then eventually after repeated violations over years when it becomes too large it should all get written off because it is a "crazy amount"?

It shouldn't all be written off. The fine should be a reasonable amount, not half a million dollars. You can buy an entirely new house with that kind of dough.

The fines were a reasonable amount, and then he ignored them for eight years straight and then argued in court that US law doesn't apply to him because [sovereign citizen voodoo].

This being a court case it was pretty easy to locate the property and neighborhood - houses there are 750k to 1M.

He could’ve settled this 7 years ago, since the majority of the fine was a $250 per day non-compliance fine.

Not sure how it comes from my comment. There are plenty of ways to enforce fines without first going higher than orbit

What are these ways? Send repeated notices? Sue them? Get a court order? They already did all of this.

Also, his argument in response wasn't that the fines were incorrect in any way, it was that the law just didn't apply to him because [sovereign citizen voodoo].

For example, in a bunch of countries I have lived there's some sort of judicial enforcement service which can find your accounts, and issue an order to banks to transfer right amount from them, or seize your car if there are nothing there. Dammit, even administrative arrest is not as stupid as half a million as a way to make him clean his yard.

I mean sure, fighting things in court and losing is going to cost you more money than admitting defeat. However, at some point the council should just say "you had your chance to rectify the issue, we hired a contractor to fix that for you, here's the bill", rather than letting a fine of $250/day build up over multiple years.

He also refused to allow city officials on his property for that entire time, so fixing it for him wasn't an option.

Yeah, I see from other comments he went the sovereign idiot route. An interesting observation is I'm 95% sure back in my (european) home country, they'd just take the clean up action to court and seek forced entry on grounds of hazard to public health.

The judge thinks it's reasonable because he has a law degree and experience as a lawyer and a judge.

Can we sue California for abusing a person who has done nothing wrong?

>Mauro cited a 2000 San Francisco case, in which courts ruled a $663,000 fee for ongoing code violations was not constitutionally excessive, as precedent.

The world has gone mad.

My guess is that this is (as mentioned here in the article) the problem with (somewhat more) reasonable fines per day, snowballing.

If it's not criminal, and all you can do is fine, and no action is taken to prevent the the fine incurring - I'm not really sure what option there is.

Do you cap it? Send in the bailiff's to remove the offending thing at a certain point? Just write it all off, setting a precendent?

I've genuinely no idea.

Yes, there should certainly be a cap. $573,000 sounds like it would be from an unreasonable government at best, authoritarian government at worst with no common sense.

But the problem with caps, is that people hit them.

As a hypothetical, imagine a polluting plant poisoning the neighbourhood. You want them to know once their fine gets to $1M it's capped? You've suddenly presented a clear choice to the plant - fix it if it'll cost less than $1M, if it'll cost more keep ignore.

If you're going to fine anybody "per unit of time", you have to keep it open-ended (as otherwise the only people who'll ignore you, are those making more profit per day, than the per day cost)

It's not an all or nothing thing. You can cap some fines and not others obviously. Fining someone $573,000 for having vehicles in his back yard and working on them is ludicrous and absolutely makes the government look like either a bully, out of touch with reality, incompetent, or all of the above.

truly, let people do what they want in thier property, specially when they are building, hacking and making things for better. This is the spirit we should uphold and celebrate not punish in this country.

Working on a car on grass is an environmental issue. Oil and coolant are toxic.

Owning property lets you do a lot of things, but not everything i.e. making such a mess or danger that you affect your neighbors, like never cleaning up dog shit causing a fly problem, or making a neighborhood unseemly by turning a house into a junkyard.

I’m sympathetic to the man, that’s a massive fine, but it seems self inflicted when he could have obeyed the ruling, and sued the city at his leisure, avoiding the penalty costs.

I wish the reporter had dug into a few more things: first, the impact on the neighbor. Did they just not like the look of it, or was there more? Second, what options he had to mitigate this. Was it the grass that was the problem, and could that have been mitigated by putting down some sort of fluid catching surface, could that have helped?

My instinct is to support the old man who fixes things, but I'm cautious in coming to conclusions. He might have been doing real harm to his neighbor, or to the environment. He may have had reasonable outs and been stubborn and not taken them. We don't know enough, and I think that's a failure in journalism.

There's probably a middle ground where persons can be allowed to use their private property for businesses such as the one in this case, while still being subject to reasonable regulations that prevent environmental abuse and other such issues.

Property owner fences in backyard: Check

Property Owner maintains vehicles: check

Property owner owns propane and and gas powered generator for tools, keeps them within back yard: Check

Californian having an aneurysm because someone uses their personal space in a way they don't like or understand: Check

The absurdity is strong with this one.

Oil is only an issue when changing or leaking, and even then only the once. If you've changing it, or have leaks, use a pan. If he's not doing that, charge him with that. It's not like simply having a car on the grass emits a wave of environmental destruction? Stop harassing the man.

And if they're citing people for fruit on the grass, I want to see citations for leaves in autumn, yard furniture, hoses, sprinklers, bicycles, children's toys, planter boxes, and landscaping materials. Y'all would probably have a fit over composting.

Aaaaahhhhh I’ll play a bit of the Devil’s advocate here and say: you don’t live next door. It might well be the case that living next door to this guy is hell on Earth.

You shouldn’t just be allowed to do what you want just because you own a block of suburban land. We live in a society.

"It might well be the case that living next door to this guy is hell on Earth."

It's also possible that the complainers are stuck up pricks. I suppose we will never know since we aren't their neighbors.

"You shouldn’t just be allowed to do what you want just because you own a block of suburban land."

True. What actions did he do that negatively impacted his neighbors? Fruit falling off his trees? Working on a car and having some cars in just back lot? Mind you all of this was reasonably hidden as well as it is practical to do so (behind a fence).

The complaints called out by the city's response to this article include rat infestations.

Ah, I must have missed that in the article

I seriously doubt it. Working on cars isn't noisy. Had he been a chainsaw sculptor, maybe. My comment was on the amount they thought was ok to fine him and the fact a judge didn't find it excessive.

I suspect it was more of a bureaucratic, "you will respect my authorit-a" type thing and the judge didn't keep them in check.

> Working on cars isn't noisy.

That is not my experience at any mechanic's shop ever! And even without all the fancy tools, my neighbor was banging on their engine for hours just last weekend. Maybe they don't know what they're doing, and therefore it doesn't count as work, but it sure was loud.

It's not clear to me that he was working on cars. Thinking about working on cars, planning to work on cars, sure.

Playing devil’s advocate is fun, but you don’t know. And it’s hard to imagine how fixing a car could be hell on earth for the neighbors. Listen to how it sounds.

It’s over half a million dollars for fixing a car, man (woman; I wish there was a gender neutral term that had the same flexibility, since “bud” just sounds aggressive).

The city has noted that the neighbors complained about rats, and that the guy actively refused to allow a city inspector onto the property (who could have, presumably, confirmed or denied reports of vermin infestation). That's less 'fixing a car' and more 'letting stuff sit there unattended until it fills up with animal nests'.

That was not mentioned as anything that was part of the $573,000 fine. Not sure why you are mentioning it as a justification. Do you feel people will be ok with fining someone $573,000 for having rats in their yard vs. having vehicles?

It's in the city's response to this article: https://sacramentocityexpress.com/2022/04/19/city-corrects-m...

Reading between the lines here, the most likely course of events is pretty obvious: he let non-operational vehicles sit in his backyard indefinitely while 'working' on them (i.e. thinking about working on them and putting it off until next week every time), those turned into rats' nests (fed, at least in part, by the uncollected fruit from the trees on the same property), and the neighbors started complaining about rats everywhere that they couldn't do anything about because most of them were living on the guy's unmaintained property.

Now which part of that do you think justifies a $573,000 fine?

The part where when he was cited 8 years ago and told that the fine was $250/day for non compliance.

It’s about 90k per year.

You didn't justify it, you enumerated it. Explain why you believe fining someone $573,000 for having cars in their back yard working on them is reasonable and justifiable.

Because there was presumably no or minimal fine for violating this civil ordinance, should he have complied with mitigating the violation.

There are then penalties for continuing the violation.

So should the state have just given up? At what point? If there were a maximum, what would it be?

Personally, maybe $5000, but that might be too much. The guy is 83 years old, probably living on a fixed income (social security) making side money on fixing cars, or just has cars in his back yard. The amount fined is way higher than appropriate for such a "crime." You shouldn't beat people into compliance for minor transgressions, wether that be as a police officer with a baton/taser/fist/knee, or a clerk issuing fines. When we live under a government with no empathy, as shown by this example, we're doomed.

I don’t know why I keep coming back to this - maybe because he reminds me of people in my life that have had similar problems.

He was 75 when he was first cited, not 83.

He was given a chance to mitigate the code violation and he refused, which incurred a 250 per day penalty which he refused to pay.

He dragged it out for 7 years by being his own lawyer and and presumably has also not rectified the code violation.

As an aside, if he had actually fixed these cars they would not be in his back yard. He’s a hoarder.

I’d be willing to bet that he could settle this for less than the full amount.

There’s just something about this mindset of (a) he’s too old to be held accountable (b) free will/it’s his property to do what he wants with it (c) he’s just a hacker and we should be encouraging people to ignore civil law when it’s inconvenient.

It’s also likely that his dragging this through the court system for so many years has probably cost more than he owes - and when he dies or abandons the property the state will likely have to pay to clean up after him.

Sorry, bad mood rant today. All that being said, I have no skin in this game, it just touched a raw nerve.

Maybe they should just execute him for not respecting the state's authority. Would that satisfy your lust for a pound of flesh? Sound extreme? So does $573K, that's my point. I don't care that he dared to test the constitutionality of what the state was doing to him (we should thank him for trying), it's excessive and stupid and makes us all look like an uncivilized backwater nation that has no concept of justice or money. They should have at least put a stay on it while it was under judicial review, or capped it. Nope, gotta have our pound of flesh.

Is the cruelty of our state a reflection of our own cruelty, or do you think it's the other way around? Perhaps cruelty feeds cruelty. Maybe if we weren't so cruel all this horrible shit on the news would stop happening so much.

There's not an insignificant chance he will catch a warrant then be jailed for inability to pay the fine and if that happens, he'll probably die in prison. I guess we get to execute him after all, just not so directly. That'll teach him?

It’s private property, a city inspector has no right to trespass.

Well, yes, sure. But if all your neighbors say that rats are breeding in your suburban backyard and you refuse to allow anyone in who could document otherwise, resulting civil action like fines should be no surprise.

It's trivial to imagine, if you've ever worked on a car, had a "car guy" neighbor, lived near a service shop, etc. Many cars are neither quiet nor do they confine their emissions to property boundaries.

The city’s blog post about the case gives an idea of what the neighbors were experiencing;

> neighbors complaining that [the yard] had become a harborage for rats.

I would have used "dude" and not worried about it - HN is mostly dudes and from my experience female nerds could care less if you call them dudes (and may even get a little thrill out of it.)

You wouldn’t date a dude unless you like dudes. The ones I’ve spoken with definitely don’t get a thrill out of that.

Not sure what you mean. Not talking about dating anyone, talking about addressing someone online as "dude". Where I grew up, in LA, "dude" is used by both men and women to address each other. And unless you yourself are harmed, or know someone who is harmed by this usage, I'd avoid taking speculative umbrage first because it's bad for your heart, and second because it's a huge waste of everyone's time.

The fact that you feel it’s a waste of time is part of the problem, dude. I’m relating things that women have told me directly. It’s not speculative. It’s exhausting when you’re part of a group and constantly mislabeled.

Being friends with a diverse range of people helps with this.

Next time you feel it’s okay to refer to a woman as a dude, just remember that you wouldn’t date a dude unless you were into dudes.

If you’d like to discuss further, I’d be willing, since it’s an important topic to me. But we have to keep it high quality and substantive.

>I’m relating things that women have told me directly. It’s not speculative. It’s exhausting when you’re part of a group and constantly mislabeled.

I don't recall any of my female friends ever getting offended by being called a "dude." I imagine they would get annoyed by some random person presuming to "protect" them from people on the internet, as if they were unable to speak up for themselves. Perhaps a bit misogamist when you think about it, no?

>Being friends with a diverse range of people helps with this.

Perhaps you should follow your own advice here if all the women you know get offended by being called "dude."

>But we have to keep it high quality and substantive.

Let me translate. "Hi, I'm a volunteer member of the thought police in good standing, and I feel you've committed a crime, which means you have. You are resisting, and I've already explained to you the facts about your crime, and even in a polite manner (which is not required; you're welcome), and now you have the temerity to resist. Resistance to my authority is, of course, an even greater crime. Before you ignore me, realize that the penalty for both crimes is total ostracism from every part of society in which thought police have sway. Which is a lot of it."

Delusion doesn't frighten me, but shared delusion does because it can turn delusion into reality. You and your fellow thought police have amassed remarkable real power, which means your threats are not empty (interestingly, the same holds true for your empty-headed conspiracy monger counterparts on the right). The smart thing to do is to cave, at least outwardly, and beg forgiveness. But I feel this is dishonest and cowardly, and frankly it goes against every fiber of my being. I have always stood up against injustice as I perceived it, even as a child, and I'm not about to stop now just because I'm old and wise enough to see it's in my best interest.

I refuse your offer. Your interaction with me has not been "high quality and substantive" up to this point, it has been smug, close-minded, judgemental, and aggressive and without basis. The power to judge others for their speech is a valid one within a limited range. We all should act to protect those being actively abused. But judgement, and self-restraint, and real victims, are critical to maintaining the validity of that power. When there are no victims, when the word is not an epithet, when the speaker has no malice, your actions are not then to protect anyone, but to flex your newfound power and cow others to your will. With the added twist that you get to speak down to your victim "But we have to keep it high quality and substantive".

I don't recognize the kangaroo court you've devised, and to you, officer of the thought police, I say: GFY.

Also, don't call me dude. You've lost the right.

Good fences (and even better lots of land) make for good neighbors. But in typical suburban lots, there's presumably some level of junkyard accumulation on a property (or serious degradation of a house) that causes issues for neighbors even absent HOA excesses. There are some limits that all but the most radical libertarians would agree with. It's a question of how much.

Let me know how you feel when your neighbor starts animal rendering and leather tanning at scale.

Making them homeless might be a bit of an overkill for that transgression, no?

Just guessing, having few operable or inoperable tanks on the backyard would be ok, because of 2nd amendment ;) omg...

As a matter of fact, the world’s largest private collection of tanks was owned by Jacques Littlefield (a resident of Portola Valley, California).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques_Littlefield

Sounds a lot like annoyed bureaucrats making a very expensive example of one guy defending what appears to be (we don't have all the facts) a harmless action, to teach all citizens a lesson. There was a time when repairing your own vehicle was widely applauded ... and well-supported by commerce.

Maybe he could have afforded a lawyer until the $250-a-day fine began. (The modern version of Lord's vassals whipping someone.)

I'm amazed that I have just seen a second example of CA Court B.S. in the same day. The first event today was when a court declared that bumblebees could be legally considered fish.

https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/bees-are-fish-under...

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