CHICAGO | Economic & Business Development

[LouisVanDerWright]

^^^ That's because the city and county make it a point to rake you over the coals for more revenue to shovel to their cronies at every juncture. I just got two tickets thrown out in court today because they were both ridiculous. I was found totally not at fault for either. One was a sanitation citation for "overflowing dumpster" the other was a "truck parked on side street" parking ticket.

The "overflowing dumpster" was actually a construction dumpster filled to the brim with like one bag over the fill line. The city's "evidence" was pictures of this full dumpster with literally no trash on the ground anywhere around it. The judge himself said "that's the cleanest construction site I think I've ever seen in 30 years here". This was for $200 and was a total joke of an offense. Clearly this was just some inspector who needed to reach his quota going around and writing tickets for every dumpster he saw that was full.

The other was for parking my pickup, which has a cap and firefighter plates, both of which exempt you from this law, on a side street. I got the ticket in the mail a week after the original hearing date.

You'd think that, being found totally innocent in both cases, I would be off the hook for any fees. But no, since my building and my truck are owned by LLC's, the city won't let me represent myself in court because "LLC's are people too" and therefore I can't represent them since I'm not an attorney. So I had to pay an attorney $100 to get rid of the $200 ticket and $25 to get rid of the $75 ticket. So, even though the city was totally f'ing off base here, I still got fined $125 to defend myself against $275 worth of bullshit.

It's maddening. Frankly I'm going to start calling around to class action attorneys and see if we can't get a class action to shut down 400 W Superior for being blatantly unconstitutional. Guilty until proven innocent and even you are innocent you have to pay an attorney and can't recover fees. Like after I saw the pictures I was asking my attorney "are you sure I can't take this to circuit court and sue the city for your fees?", but it's not even an option in this dog and pony show.