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The Rev. Makes a Stink About A Stink
(Well-known Suer sues Sewer)
by Theresa
Fritz Camoriano
The Rev.
Louis Coleman has sued the Metropolitan Sewer District and the Jefferson
County Air Pollution Control District over a stench being emitted from a
sewage treatment plant in western Louisville.
While many of us have grown weary of the Reverend's frequent
whining, we ought to pay attention to this particular incident, because it
can be very instructive. Here
are four lessons we can learn:
1.
First, it shows that we do not need to hand our property rights
over to the government through zoning or other government power grabs in
order to be able to protect ourselves from neighbors who emit odors, noise, or other
nuisances. Nuisance laws have
been available for hundreds of years under the common law to provide such
protection, and that is what the Reverend Coleman is using.
2.
Second, it shows that giving over our property rights to the
government does no good in protecting us.
The area in which the stench was emitted was already zoned and
supposedly protected by an air pollution control agency, but that did
nothing to stop the odors. All
the scare tactics about stinky hog farms or chicken processing plants
moving next door if we don't establish zoning are just nonsense.
3.
Third, it shows that government is not the savior people believe it
is. In this case, in fact, it
was a government corporation that was causing the stench in the first
place. If the stinkers had
been a private corporation instead of the Metropolitan Sewer District,
there might have been quicker action taken against them, but, as we
noticed in the former Soviet Union, the government is frequently the worst
polluter.
4.
Fourth, the more we rely on political controls rather than the
common law, the more the politically powerful gain at the expense of the
politically weak. Nobody even
imagines that MSD would attempt to put a stinky sewage treatment plant in
a more affluent part of town, where the movers and shakers congregate,
such as near the Reverend's home.
The Metropolitan Sewer District says it is just about ready to end
the stink anyway, and we hope that is true.
But, in any event, this case shows very clearly that property
owners can rely on the laws of nuisance and trespass to protect
themselves, and they are fools if they rely on government agencies for
protection. If we hand over
our rights to some panel of bureaucrats through zoning or other regulatory
controls, we tie our own hands to benefit the politically powerful.
Handing over property rights to the politically powerful does
nothing to protect the property rights of ordinary people.
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