permaculture

[Marimike6@cs.com]

Lawrence, Judith and everyone--

This won't be a popular thought with everyone, but I wonder who's been paying the property taxes on these fourteen downtown acres these past ten years. Whoever it is gets to say what happens to the land, under our system of land ownership. If it belongs to the city it's the same as if it belonged to anyone else. By not collecting taxes they are paying out a chunk of change for the privilege of letting others garden.

This is why so few people would allow a gardening group to use their vacant land. By allowing an informal leasehold they would be setting themselves up for a lawsuit if they ever wanted to reclaim the land for their own purposes. This may not sound fair but that's the way the system works.

If it were your land and you'd let someone use it for ten years you might think the same way. I don't know whether they paid anyone rent or other consideration-- their web site is a little stingy with hard facts-- but I tend to think they must have known from day one that this might happen to them some day. And now it has.

Mike Elvin
Land Owner