This is the kind of story that just makes you crazy. It’s akin to the zero-tolerance idiocy that you hear about almost every week in our public schools. Well-intentioned (that’s giving them the benefit of doubt), but misguided individuals engage in a patently silly course of action, while keeping their common sense safely tucked away in their back pockets.
This is exactly what happened to Mike Haege in Minneapolis, where a May 22 tornado created lots of damage. Mike, from nearby Hastings, is a licensed tree business. He was going to be off on Monday, May 23, so he decided he would go to Minneapolis and help out, free of charge, with cleaning up the storm-damaged trees. He signed paperwork, and a waiver, to be a volunteer with the Urban League, and they provided him with some volunteers to assist.
Not long after he got busy cleaning up, someone in the city’s bureaucracy got wind that a scurrilous individual was helping people out without a license:
Tree trimmers who work in Minneapolis need to be licensed with the city. It’s a regulation in place throughout many cities, and something Haege knows all about. He’s licensed in Hastings and several area cities. Since he doesn’t work in Minneapolis, he isn’t licensed there. All that was moot, of course. He was just going to volunteer and was not charging residents for his services.
He had brought a bucket truck to get high if needed, and he brought a wood chipper to dispose of fallen trees. He and the volunteers got to work on homes where the resident didn’t have insurance. “We were removing stuff so people could get out of their driveways and out of their doors,” he said. “The place was a pretty big disaster.”
What happened next shocked Haege. A city inspector arrived at the scene. She told Haege he had to leave. Immediately. “You have to leave right now,” the inspector told Haege. “You’re not licensed to be here.”
“I said, ‘I’m just a volunteer,’ and she didn’t believe me.” Haege went back to his truck and got his volunteer paperwork. Still, that did little to get the inspector off his back. “I don’t want to see you up here,” she told him. “She just didn’t believe me,” he said.
A volunteer from the Urban Homeworks, who had been with Haege since he signed up to volunteer that morning, did his best to convince the inspector that Haege wasn’t charging for his services. Residents then came out of their doors in his defense, telling the inspector that he had just performed work at their house and hadn’t charged them a dime. Still, the defense fell on deaf ears.
The inspector told him to get out of the city, so Haege left with the volunteer. As they were on their way back to the volunteer area, residents waved down Haege, pleading for help. He pulled over and helped get a tree out of the way for them. Haege had no idea police officers were behind him in a sort of unofficial escort out of town. He said they stopped traffic for about two hours while they figured out what to do with him. At one point, officers threatened to throw him in jail, he said.
They didn’t throw him in jail, but they did let him know by mail of the $275 fine for trimming trees without a license. I read some comments to the story at the Hastings Star Gazette, and it turns out that the section of Minneapolis where Haege was working is one of its poorest – the folks there can least afford to have a licensed tree service do work. Never mind that, though: the city inspector’s mission was accomplished.
This is the scourge of government grown too big – too many employees with nothing to do but enforce regulations design, ostensibly, to “protect” the citizens (mainly from themselves). Too little common sense allowed in the administration of their business. Rules is rules. It reminds me of one of my favorite quotes from Ronald Reagan:
The nine most terrifying words in the English language are, ‘I’m from the government, and I’m here to help
Read the rest of the story, and the comments from the Hastings Star Gazette
