While I've put it off for awhile, lately I've took it upon myself to compose an overdue letter to the Corporation Counsel for the City of Springfield.
The letter was to address their fining of our non-profit a sum of $365 for not fixing a roof on one of our houses as fast as they'd have liked.
The first draft of the letter was two whole pages, and referenced Kafka, Pyongyang, the 7th Amendment, Edmund Burke and a closing vow that would make Churchill's "we will fight them on the beaches" speech seem a bit weak and conciliatory!
Neither they - nor you - will be seeing that letter! But I enjoyed writing it all the same!
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| Building and Zoning? Okay, we might surrender! |
The second draft, where I took the advice of a long ago lawyer I knew in Fairbanks who once asked me, "What's the goal?", is below. That lawyer's question was actually one of the pivotal learning moments in my life.
He was making a point. I was in a case against a University that was infringing upon our Constitutional rights (heh, heh!), and I was conducting myself in a fashion that I thought "wise" for my twenty-something age, but was really rather incendiary.
He reminded me in the asking of that question - is the goal to upset them beyond all reason, or to gain a specific objective? He caused me to understand that "just and righteous scoldings" and "resolving a dispute" are not the same things!
Here then is the letter designed to gain a specific and moral objective, rather than to tell off the officials as it might seem that they so richly deserve! It'll be mailed out later today, but you may all have a sneak peek of it now!
To: Xxxxx X. Xxxxx, Corporation Counsel
From: Dean West, Registered Agent
Date: November 28, 2016
Ref: AC Docket No. 2016-AC-00XX
Sir:
We were not notified of the hearing of the XXth of May, 2016. Nor were we made aware of any opportunity to appeal this in absentia judgment against us.
It is our position that as a non-profit, we have to date taken two houses - at 700 E. Stanford Ave, (condemned) and 634 E. Stanford Ave. (eligible to be condemned) - and made them whole.
Where two eyesores stood, now two nice houses stand. Where there was a real danger of there being no one to pay property taxes on either of those houses, now they are paid each year.
Our “crime”, if such there be, was apparently in replacing a roof slower than “the City of Springfield” would have liked. A roof that did not even leak.
Having long since complied with all the demands made upon us, we ask now that the $365 fine be waived or dismissed and we be allowed to continue about our business undisturbed.
A business which in part has been good at - and will continue to be good at - finding and restoring distressed and abandoned properties so as to aid those in our community wrestling with alcoholism and addiction.
Dean West, Registered Agent
217-720-2568
clemens177@hotmail.com 
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