Do you think an anonymous commenter is above exagerrating? Who has more credibility, a journalist with a byline, or an anonymous commenter?
Suggestion: Read the article in The Blade and look at the picture therein.
My thought: the person who posted to the comments section might be the person who called in the complaint in the first place.
Here is the ordinance:
That’s a tough call. 
It’s one thing to try to keep the community nice by keeping cars off the lawn, but this man **has **no paved driveway. It’s gravel. Is he supposed to drop 6 grand for a paved driveway?
Clearly he’s not capable of that, and as I watch the mayor of Toledo dodge and ignore questions from the media, I find him to be an arrogant ass.
I saw this on the news. He has a nice graveled driveway. Law says he can’t use it unless it’s paved. No parking on any unpaved area.
I was bringing to everybody’s attention material not in the article for consideration by the people here. You were just shooting down the information, because the article’s author did not mention it. This thread asked for help understanding why the article was confusing as written. I will not turn this into a debate about who I should believe is more credible when I know neither of these people and they both are likely to only give facts in ways that serve their own purpose.
I guess you have to subscribe in order to get access. What I’m asking, though, is if that’s a vehicle code, or a housing code?
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Nope. Apparently, you can’t link to an internal page (or at least not within the time limit set by my attention span). Here is the code: http://www.amlegal.com/nxt/gateway.dll/Ohio/toledo/toledomunicipalcode?fn=altmain-nf.htm$f=templates$3.0&vid=amlegal:toledo_oh
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It’s part of the Traffic Code, section 351.07.
In the video, there is not a single part of the driveway that is paved. Neither my parents’ house in Michigan, nor my uncle’s house in Ohio (or any single one of his neighbors) have paved driveways. They are all gravel and are considered a type of “pavement”.
Carty arrogant? You must be joking! 
All together now:
“Driving is a privilege, not a right”.
:rolleyes:
If anyone’s still confused regarding what a “turn-around portion” of a driveway is, look up 2610 N. Holland Sylvania Road, Toledo, Ohio 43615, on Google maps. The driveway has a spur that’s used for turning the car so you don’t have to back out into a busy street.
According to the Toledo Blade article that **DSYoungEsq **linked to, that seems to be the opinion of the Police Union president and the City Councilman who represents this area, too.
This is looking to turn into an ugly internal political battle for the Toledo city government.
All political battles in Toledo are ugly internal ones. The Republican Party in the city is so dominated by the Democrats that the Democrats have actually split into two factions: the “A” Team and the “B” Team. I honestly forget which side Carty is on (the other side includes the prior mayor, Jack Ford, who took over from Carty when Carty was term-limited out several years ago), but almost all political battles are, behind the scenes, A-team v. B-team battles.
I was watching a Toledo Channel’s news last night (36, I think), who were interviewing a lawyer (Napolitono, not sure of his first name. That name sounds recently familiar, but I’m not sure from where. He was interviewing from New York for what it’s worth. Anywho…). I’ll attempt to channel what he said:
There are three problems with the ticketing of the cars. First, the city charter only authorizes police officer to give these tickets, not Streets, Bridges and Harbor employees. Second, even for the police to give these tickets, they would need a warrant to enter the property to give the tickets. Third, he said that since this was a law which had not been enforced for a long time (he called it a dormant law), it violates the Due Process clause of the U.S. constitution. To begin enforcing that law, the city would have to publish a notice that they were going to be enforcing it.
Me again. In the TV piece, they showed several driveways, all of which were all gravel. At least one person interviewed pointed to a gravel area where he said his car was parked when it received its ticket.
ETA: All the properties shown had chain link fences in front, with closable gates (closed for the TV piece, at least), with the cars parked beyond the fence.
Well, now we reach the realm of the sillier.
The attorney in question is probably wrong on all three counts.
First of all, the City passed an ordinance allowing the Streets, Bridges and Harbor employees to write citations for Vehicle ordinance violations (the reason being to allow them to deal with improperly parked cars during snow clearing operations). Now, unless the attorney had the city’s charter right in front of him, wherein it specifically states that ONLY police officers can be allowed to write citations, then there would be no reason that the city couldn’t let other employees write them.
As far as the warrant goes, if a violation of the law is seen from off the property, then no warrant is needed to enter the property to attend to the violation. Remember, we aren’t talking something happening in the house here. The expectation of privacy in your front yard is very low. If the lawyer was right, the city would need a warrant to, say, put up notice of code violations on the door of a home. :rolleyes:
As for dormant statute: this is simply speculation on his part. He has no knowledge of the last time prior to this that this section of code was enforced. It is likely that they use it all the time to combat vehicles parked on lawns in the seedier sections of town. But the sort of situation he’s talking about involves something unused for a long, long time. And it’s not as simple as he makes it out to be.
If you go north along the street here, you will see the area in question. At the time they took this film, Holland-Sylvania was undergoing a massive reconstruction. As you can see, not all have chain link fences. And those as do usually keep them open. So that’s not really an issue, and it wouldn’t stop someone from simply opening the gate to come in and deal with the violation, even if they were.
This does not mean that what the City’s commissioner did was necessarily valid. One argument that can certainly be tried is that “gravel” is a type of pavement. If this is not true, then large numbers of homes in the city, especially on its fringes, where they annexed areas that were relatively rural originally, will be unable to park legally without “paving” their driveways. Thus, there would be a valid distinction between simple dirt, and what most of these homes have, which is pea-gravel.
Second, a related concept to this “dormant law” idea is one of “selective enforcement.” It can be a violation of due process if the City selectively enforces the ordinance only in certain circumstances. If they are not going to go out and ticket everyone who is parked on something other than asphalt or concrete, and if they cannot show a valid interpretation of the ordinance that establishes that the cars ticketed by the Commissioner were in violation when cars parked on gravel elsewhere are not, then they are picking and choosing their victims and that’s generally not allowed (I’m not going to go into a big long-winded exposition of due process law on the subject, which will make everyone happy, I’m sure :p).
And then, there is the law of common sense. But that law tends not to be applied a lot in Toledo. :rolleyes:
Perhaps he did. It’s available online (I skimmed it a bit just now, but I don’t know what to look for, really, and don’t have the time to read it all).
:dubious: Isn’t this simply speculation on your part? Isn’t it true that you have no knowledge of what knowledge the attorney has?
I believe he said something to the effect that the ordinance was passed <mumble> years ago and was never used until now. They were interviewing him for several minutes, and it’s hard for me to remember everything he said.
A more fundamental problem with the “dormant law” defense is described here:
(Emphasis added.) Are those weird laws you hear about for real? - The Straight Dope
If parking on an unpaved driveway – that is a gravel/crushed stone driveway, not one that’s just dirt that might’ve once been a yard – is illegal in Toledo city limits, then it seems that it should be illegal to have such a driveway, given that people will, at some point or another, park in their driveway (or have guests, servicepeople, etc. park there). Why would the city allow something to exist that cannot be legally used?