The Lawyers Role in Municipal Illegality

The City of Gaastra has outgrown their britches. Two ordinance
revisions, #36 and #39, have to do with "unsafe buildings" and
"noxious weeds" respectively. Both these ordinances have added
an illegal coercive punishment of jail time. That's prohibited by
state law in each instance, but the City Commission doesn't care,
they want what they want and got the City Attorney to write the
modifications for them.

The statutes regulating municipal oversight of buildings are
convoluted and complex, but the only jail time I found in them is
for the most extreme cases of refusing to correct health dangers
resulting from noncomplying outhouses.

The statute regulating noxious weeds establishes a maximum
penalty of $100, thereby prohibiting all the irrational escalation
features like "each day constitutes a new offense." Penalties
increasing to $500 per incident along with 30 days of jail are
prohibited by state law.

Another nasty feature provides that the city may seek a permanent
court injunction against the violation. The effect of such an action is
that further violation(s) escalate the penalties into a felony class by
making the responsibility subject to significant penalties and jail time
counted in years instead of days.

All these features of the newly revised ordinances violate state law.

The regulations concerned with attorneys licensed by the state
prohibit lawyers from encouraging their clients to violate state
laws. It is past time for municipal lawyers in Iron County who
have enabled and encouraged their clients to violate state laws
to be called to the mat before their licensing boards. It is likely that
city commissioners are ignorant of their limitations where power to
enact ordinances is concerned. The wanton illegal behavior of the
lawyers, the last layer of protection that citizens have against insane
measures being undertaken by local governments, has the one
individual educated in precisely that discipline, enabling and
encouraging their clients into illegality precisely because nobody
has ever filed a formal complaint against them for this misbehavior.

It is time that ignoring the lawyers comes to an end. Anyone who
wishes to join me in submitting a complaint against Gaastra's city
attorney can send me email.

Bill Vajk