This article is from the Wall Street Journal...
“Overzealous regulators are targeting yoga teachers, accountants and even YouTube video creators.”
“By C. Jarrett Dieterle and Shoshana Weissmann
July 15, 2018
(The majority of this article is about Kim O’Neil and that is the only part used for this Blog Posting)
Chandler, Ariz.—a city of some 250,000 southeast of Phoenix—describes itself as “built on entrepreneurial spirit.” You could forgive Kim O’Neil for not buying it.
Ms. O’Neil and her family are longtime residents of Chandler. Until recently she ran a medical-billing company in the town. For years she worked out of leased office space, but when Ms. O’Neil’s father became ill in 2013 she moved the business to her home. After her father died in 2015, she continued to run the business out of her house, because she could fulfill her work obligations while caring for her elderly mother.
In the summer of 2016, Ms. O’Neil received a letter from the city of Chandler informing her that she was illegally operating a home-based business. She needed to apply for a permit within seven days or face action from the city government. Ms. O’Neil assumed the permit would be easy to obtain. Her business was conducted entirely within her home, had no signage or visiting customers, and didn’t require the storage of commercial equipment or inventory.
Chandler officials didn’t see it that way. They told Ms. O’Neil that her three employees were not allowed to work on-site, though they parked in her driveway and didn’t cause traffic concerns. Eventually, in an attempt to appease city officials, Ms. O’Neil instructed her employees to work from their own residences rather than her home.
City officials were still unmoved. They informed Ms. O’Neil that she would have to build a parking facility, submit architectural drawings of her home, and obtain approval from every neighbor within 600 feet. Doing so would have been expensive, but that wasn’t all. The city even suggested Ms. O’Neil might have to attend monthly meetings with city officials. Her business bothered no one and was entirely self-contained in her home, but Ms. O’Neil eventually gave up. She shut down her business, calling the episode “one of the most stressful experiences of my life.”
Some regulation is necessary and nuisance laws can play an important role in ensuring that a home-based business doesn’t unduly burden the neighbors. But many local rules hurt small businesses with no discernible benefit. Not all businesses may be appropriate to run out of a home, but operations like Ms. O’Neil’s are the sort of entrepreneurial endeavors that government should be supporting, not thwarting.”
Mr. Dieterle is director of commercial freedom and a senior fellow at the R Street Institute. Ms. Weissmann is a policy analyst and the digital media specialist at R Street.
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Kim O’Neil’s business was completely self-contained within her home and, if she did not tell her neighbors that her home contained a home-based business, her neighbors would probably never have known the business was there.
Beware of a bureaucrat with a set of regulations.
Would I kid u?
Smartfella
