A Florida woman was fined $100,000 for a dirty pool and overgrown grass. When do fines become excessive?
DUNEDIN, Fla. – Kristi Allen read the letter and thought it had to be a scam.
It said she owed $92,600 in fines for overgrown vegetation and a stagnant swimming pool at a house she no longer owned. She must pay in two weeks, the letter said, and it hinted that she could be sued if she didn't. Including interest charges and other fees, her debt swelled to $103,559, about twice her yearly income.
Three months later, in late 2018, the city of Dunedin sued to collect, setting off another legal fight over how local governments use their power to impose heavy fines on citizens. What Allen, 38, a mother of two, thought had to be a scam turned into a nightmare she said could bankrupt her family.
In early 2014, three years after Kristi Allen moved out, a code inspector came to the house, which had been vacant. Brown palm tree leaves littered the overgrown backyard. A neighbor told the inspector that something dead may have been rotting there. The swimming pool had turned into a bright green, mosquito-infested cesspool.
Dunedin, a small seaside city outside Tampa, cracks down on code violations, saddling homeowners with massive fines while its revenue grows. In 5½ years, the city has collected nearly $3.6 million in fines – sometimes tens of thousands at a time – for violating laws that prohibit grasses taller than 10 inches, recreational vehicles parked on streets at certain hours or sidings and bricks that don't match.
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Dunedin officials declined to be interviewed but insisted through a spokesman that the fines they impose are neither excessive nor abusive. Dunedin’s code enforcement policies are meant to “protect the integrity of neighborhoods and the quality of the community,” spokesman Ron Sachs said.
City and county records show that at least 33 homeowners owed the city $20,000 or more in fines as of May. That tally does not include dozens of bank- and company-owned houses with hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of code violations.
In some cases, the fines seem to have more to do with aesthetics than public safety.
The city fined a man nearly $30,000 because of a “chronic” overgrown yard.
It fined a couple $31,000 for fixing their roof without a permit after a tree fell on it during a hurricane.
“They’re using a shotgun to kill a mouse,” said Bill Prescott, who was fined $43,000 because of an inoperative car and a pile of dried leaves in his front yard and plants that grew over the street. Prescott, who lives with his wife in Tallahassee, said he became ill last year and couldn’t make the long drive to Dunedin to maintain his second home. Fines of $250 a day piled up without his knowledge, Prescott said.
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Allen moved to Dunedin in 2005 to be with her boyfriend, Keith, who later became her husband. She bought a bungalow-style house on the same street where he was raised. It had a swimming pool and a backyard next to a popular hiking trail, so for someone who loves swimming and the outdoors, it seemed perfect. They planted palm trees in the yard and restored the pool that had sat empty for years.
Then the financial crisis hit. Allen, a radiologic technologist, took a pay cut and lost her house in the wave of foreclosures that washed over Florida. She signed an agreement with U.S. Bank National Association allowing the foreclosure and moved out. She thought Dunedin was behind her.
In early 2014, three years after Allen moved out, a code inspector came to the house, which had been vacant. Brown palm fronds littered the overgrown backyard. A neighbor told the inspector that something dead may have been rotting there. The swimming pool had turned into a bright green, mosquito-infested cesspool.
City officials sent notices of the problems to Allen, who was still listed as the homeowner in county property records. Then they started fining her $100 a day. The letters mailed to Allen were returned undeliverable with no forwarding address. The city kept fining her anyway.
Allen said none of this should have been her problem. As far as she knew, she relinquished ownership of the house when she agreed to the foreclosure in 2011. Her name stayed in property records because the foreclosure was not finalized until late 2014. By then, the city had been fining Allen for several months. (U.S. Bank National Association said it did not have control of Allen's loan and referred questions about the case to the company that serviced Allen's mortgage, which did not immediately respond.)
The daily fines continued for the next two years until a code inspector visited the house again and saw it had been cleaned and renovated. For much of the time the fines were accumulating in 2015 and 2016, Allen no longer owned the house.
Seeking to collect, Dunedin’s city attorney mailed the demand letter to Allen – this time to her current address. She looked up the attorney’s name online and realized the letter was real.
“It defies common sense that someone could all of a sudden owe $100k where they had no idea there was even an issue,” her attorney, Ben Hillard, said.
Allen isn’t the only homeowner to accuse Dunedin of overzealous code enforcement practices and say they were blindsided by a huge fine that accumulated for years. Others, such as Guillaume Picot, said they were fined daily even as they tried to fix the violations.
After a tree smashed a corner of the roof of Picot’s rental property during Hurricane Irma two years ago, he bought $300 worth of wood and other supplies at Home Depot and fixed the damage himself. The city fined him $200 a day for fixing the roof without a permit. The fines racked up while Picot scrambled to find a locally licensed roofer who would sign off on his repairs. He and his wife owe about $31,000.
Many of the debts have swelled so much that the city can’t collect them at all. Even when Dunedin settles for a smaller amount, it is less forgiving than other cities, said Chad Orsatti, an attorney from nearby Palm Harbor who said he has settled several Dunedin code enforcement cases on behalf of homeowners.
“It’s almost Gestapo-like,” Orsatti said. “You can have a screw in the wrong spot. It’s an easy fix, but until you get that contractor to come back out there and sign off on it, those fines are running every day.”
Sachs, the city spokesman, declined to comment about Allen’s case and those of other homeowners. He said fewer than 2% of the city’s code enforcement disputes end up with cumulative fines, and those that do involve homeowners “who have chosen to stay in violation” and have shown “disdain, disregard and disrespect for the rule of law and their neighborhoods.”
Sachs said code enforcement is not about generating revenue for the city.
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Fines in some cases have become so big that they make it impossible for people to pay, let alone fix the violations that got them in trouble, said Robert Eckard, a Tampa lawyer representing another Dunedin homeowner.
“It’s like setting someone up for failure,” Eckard said. “It’s deprivation and punishment for people who don’t have the income to remedy the problem.”
Last year, the chief justice of Ohio’s Supreme Court condemned governments’ reliance on fines to make money.
“Courts are centers of justice, not automatic teller machines whose purpose is to generate revenue for governments,” Chief Justice Maureen O’Connor wrote in a letter to her fellow judges urging them not to succumb to pressure to generate revenue through the court system.
In February, the U.S. Supreme Court took a step to upend cities and states’ ability to decide for themselves when fines are appropriate.
That case started when prosecutors in Indiana went to court to demand that a man convicted of a minor drug charge forfeit his $42,000 Land Rover. The car was worth four times as much as the maximum possible fine for the crime, but the government’s attorneys argued that the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition on excessive fines did not apply to cities and states.
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The city argued that Allen should pay, even as it acknowledged that her mortgage lender had taken control of the house. Dunedin’s attorneys cited a state statute saying the lien the city placed on the house where the violation occurred applies to other personal property Allen owned.
Hillard, Allen’s attorney, said forcing her to pay violated her right to due process because she didn't know the violations even existed. Liens, Hillard argued, are tied to properties, not to a person.
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