FarmBoat and other UPWA programs continue to be administratively hampered by City of Seattle officials who assert that a notorious scofflaw parking offender was illegally employed at the FarmBoat Floating Market. The City’s attempt to garnish the market vendor’s nonexistent wages failed and FarmBoat program founders were sued for his $8,000 in parking ticket debts spanning a decade. While the lawsuit was dropped for lack of employment evidence, the City continues to hold a “gun to the head” of the non-profit organizer with threatening implications of adverse future actions.
Legal advisors are suggesting that the only sure way to alleviate potentially huge future liabilities is to directly pay off the scofflaw’s parking debts so that City enforcement officials cannot use state employer garnishment sanctions as a way to revoke licenses and generate more fines–a process which can result in substantial daily fine accumulations that far exceed the scofflaw’s parking ticket debts.
The troubling issue is that such a payment for someone else’s debt’s really amounts to nothing more than an administrative ransom to stop an indiscriminate and lawless abuse of power from doing future destruction–much the same as protection money paid to the mafia.
UPWA is considering the instigation of a crowd funding campaign to raise money for the scofflaw’s parking debts through the sale of “educational” items designed to build awareness about the dangerous effects of straying from constitutional government. If the campaign becomes active, the items are planed to include T-shirts and other memorabilia containing short anti-socialist messages protesting Seattle’s soviet-style politics.
Many local citizens have felt an unfamiliar kind of authoritarian government rapidly evolving in Seattle since 2008. The anti-free-market-pro-socialist movement has resulted in an exodus of many types of foundational businesses from the City due to extensive regulations and blatant bureaucratic abuses. Seattle’s Economic Development Department has been tasked with trying to keep a steady pace of second string entrepreneurial tenants flowing through the City’s revolving door with tax-payer funded programs. However, turnover is not as good as longevity when it comes to sustainable economics.
How do you deal with a City government that is obsessed with achieving racial equality and social justice for the masses, while taking the away individual rights? The demise of the FarmBoat program was a poiqnient example of how constitutional rights are lost in the flurry of progressive euphoria that has enveloped the City of Seattle.