Parking in a driveway is the most common way to park your car. It’s not as luxurious as in a garage. It’s not as potentially dangerous as parking on the street. However, in this story, it resulted in a six-figure fine that the Florida Supreme Court decided to uphold after several years of litigation.
While the state’s Supreme Court did not approve the fine, it declined to review the case of Sandy Martinez, a single mother who has been fighting the fine for years, which has now ballooned to $165,000 and continues to increase, CBS News reported. More than $100,000 of the fines were directly related to Ms. Martinez parking her car in the driveway and slightly on the grass. Her home is not her home alone; her home is not her home alone. Her son, daughter and sister all live with her. All four of them have full-time jobs and each has their own car. The house itself is on a corner street so no street parking is provided. So they lined up the cars in four-car lanes.
Unfortunately, one of the four cars always ended up having to park on the grass in the yard Martinez owned. The city of Lantana said this was unacceptable and fined her $250 a day for more than a year.
The Institute for Justice stepped in to represent Martinez. “Getting a six-figure fine for parking on your own property is shocking,” IJ senior attorney Ari Bargil told CBS News after the court decided not to take the case. “The court’s refusal to hear Sandy’s case is a disservice to all Floridians.”
For Martinez, options moving forward are extremely limited. CBS News said Florida’s homestead protection law protected her from foreclosure, but it destroyed the equity she had built in the home. She also can’t retry the case in Florida, and it’s unlikely that it will be heard in federal court given the Supreme Court’s ruling.
You may also like