Who owns your town anyway?

Levi Bussanich's adult bookstore
(KIROTV.com)

Just who owns a town anyway – the private property owners who live, work and invest their time, money and labor in their own property, or the politicians who think they’ve somehow been magically endowed with superhuman brainpower unavailable to mere mortals simply by winning an election?

Used to be people were responsible for building towns, not politicians.

People want a town, they get together and put up houses, a saloon, a hotel, a dry goods store, a doctor’s office, a blacksmith shop, a cathouse and, just to offset the latter, a dozen or so churches.

Then they elect a mayor and a city council and tell them, “We’re putting you in charge of building the infrastructure to serve our homes and businesses. We need roads and sidewalks and water and sewer and electrical power and a public system for quantum key distribution based on standard telecommunication lasers, detectors, and optical fiber that passively compensates for time-dependent variations of the fiber-optic path due to stress, temperature changes, or birefringence.”

Or whatever.

Today, it’s the politicians who dictate to everyone else what they can or cannot have.

KIRO TV of Olympia, Washington, tells us about businessman Levi Bussanich who owns “millions of dollars of real estate” and wants to build a grocery store on it.

But the city wants to restrict his building plans to “a couple acres” and use the rest of his private property as a “wetlands buffer.”

Bussanich has responded that if the city restricts how he can use his own property he’ll change his plans and expand his existing adult video store into a sex emporium that will feature live sex shows with both male and female strippers, a bondage and fetish area, an adult motel and a drive-through window for what he calls "great customer access."

City Councilcrats were stunned. The very people who routinely intimidate others into getting what they want by threatening them with blackmail and strong arm tactics like eminent domain and redevelopment and zoning laws and blighted neighborhood designations now accuse Bussanich of using blackmail and strong arm tactics by threatening them with his sex emporium.

One Councilcrat is quoted as accusing Bussanich of “using the threat of a sex emporium to push through approval for a grocery store.”

One can only wonder how many thousands of citycrats in how many thousands of communities across America are guilty of “using the threat of eminent domain to push through approval of a (pick one) stadium, arena, convention center, hotel, mall, condos, big box supercenter, multiuse development, or the mayor’s brother-in-law’s desire to expand the parking lot for his aluminum siding business by knocking down the third generation mom and pop lunch counter next door.”

Apparently, the shoe squeezes the toes and pinches the arch and rubs the heel raw when it’s on the other foot.