A California vineyard owner is suing Santa Clara County after officials fined him for letting his longtime employee live in an RV on his property for years.
Michael Ballard, whose family owns Savannah-Chanelle Vineyards in a city south of San Francisco, claims he was fined a total of more than $120,000 after the county said he violated local zoning laws that prohibit anyone from living in a camper to live on public or private property, according to the The Mercury News.
Marcelino Martinez, manager of the vineyard, which measures about 243,000 square feet, said his family lost the lease on a trailer they lived in years ago and had limited options for affordable housing in the area. The Ballard family agreed to let them live in an RV near the vineyards. Martinez, his wife and children have been living there for free since 2013, according to The Mercury News.
“I couldn’t make a family homeless for arbitrary reasons,” Ballard told the newspaper. “The human impact was greater than the damage or inconvenience that their continued life in the trailer would cause.”
But in July 2019, the county began fining the Ballards $1,000 per day for the RV, then lowered the fine to $250 per day, the vineyard owner said.
The province disputed that Ballard fined $120,000 and said he refused to agree to deadlines to reduce the violations, the newspaper said. Officials have made multiple offers to drastically reduce the fines if he removes the RV, they said.
The county imposed “excessive fines” and violated the U.S. Constitution with its actions against Ballard, his attorney Paul Avelar told The Mercury News.
Ballard doesn’t agree that the county spends so much time punishing him when it faces bigger problems.
“You can just drive anywhere in the province, there are mobile homes parked everywhere. Everywhere you go there are encampments,” he told the newspaper. “The problem is obvious and overt, yet they choose to prosecute us in probably the least invasive example of this, where we allow someone to live on private property in a private location and we don’t bother anyone.”