Yet another way to be declared a criminal

Baltimore County Executive Jim Smith, still recuperating* from heart bypass surgery, summoned the strength of will to alert residents to the following (emphasis and notes added):

Towson, Md. (August 14, 2008) - Baltimore County's Department of Public Works is alerting homeowners to an illegal and unnecessary house number painting service which is being advertised door-to-door through official-looking green notices. 

For a fee of $20 Community Curb Painters (a company of no known address and reachable only through a toll-free, leave-a-message-after-the-beep number) promises to paint a resident's address on the fronting curb - ostensibly to help police and fire personnel locate the property if summoned in an emergency. The advertising implies that Community Curb Painters is working in cooperation with local police and fire departments. It is not.

Such curb painting is illegal. Curbs are public property, in the public right-of-way, and unauthorized painting is prohibited under the County code.(1) Moreover, this house number "service" does not satisfy the code requirement for posting addresses required for police and fire protection in Baltimore County. On logical grounds alone, note officials, the painting makes little sense since parked cars frequently block the view of curbs. (2)

Notes: (1) If something is "public property," it belongs to everyone/no-one, and thus a member of the public ought to be able to do what he damned well pleases. To say that painting "public property" is illegal is to imply that everything not specifically permitted by law is an illegal act. While that is rapidly becoming the case in Baltimore County, we have yet to see a Charter amendment that makes it so. The more rational explanation is that curbs are county property (as are road signs), and that there is a specific law that prohibits defacing county property. This law, for example, would prohibit me from spray-painting "Jim Smith is a jackass" on the wall of the county office building.

(2) If we are attempting to argue logically that curb numbers are useless because the view of them is frequently blocked, it makes sense to ask whether having them ought to be an illegal act. If I've painted something on my curb and no one can see it, what earthly difference does it make to Towson?

This little veiled threat from the county also neglects to take into account that in many HOA-governed subdivisions, and nearly all condominiums, the sidewalks, curbs, gutters and streets are owned by the homeowners' association, not the county. In which case, a resident is not answerable to the county, but to the local arbiters of good taste.

I can't help wondering whether this curb-painting deal became an issue only because the outfit doing it has not paid the requisite licensing and registration fees to the county, and is presumably not coughing up county, state and federal taxes on its income.

Since there are existing curb numbers all over the county, and since Mr. Smith and his cronies have declared them "illegal" (without citing chapter and verse of the law), some other entrepreneur needs to pop up and offer to bring residents into full compliance with the law by sandblasting away the illicit curb numbers. As long as they pay the mandatory tributes to the government, they should be OK.

*Smith's surgery occurred more than a month ago, and he is yet unable to get fully back to his job, which seems to be making grip-and-grin appearances while fobbing off bad-news announcements to his henchman Don Mohler. Yet I know of people engaged in hard physical labor who have gone back to work the week following bypass surgery. Draw your own conclusions.

tags: baltimore county  

links: digg this    del.icio.us    technorati    reddit