Remember that “no taxation without representation” cry from revolutionary war days? It’s baaaack. At least, it’s back in Alabama. So, why should I, a Pennsylvanian care?
Here’s the gist of Alabama Senate Bill 107. “Under existing law, the planning jurisdiction of a municipality, including the approval of subdivisions, extends for five miles from the corporate limits” (ll. 22-25 p. 1). * Senate Bill 107 would reduce or eliminate that reach.
Here’s the effect of the law. If someone lives in a suburb of a city or even a town of 6,000, and wants to put a pink flamingo statue in the yard, but the city has an ordinance against pink flamingo statues, then the city authorities, the policing authority of the city, can impose a fine on the home owner if the house lies within that five-mile radius of the larger municipality. Apparently, the current law which SB 107 replaces would extend police jurisdiction and with it the right to collect taxes to support the police. “This bill [107] would also provide for audit by the Department of Examiners of Public Accounts of any expenditure by a municipality of funds derived from taxes and fees levied within its police jurisdiction” (ll. 1-3 p. 2).
Now, you might be a city dweller in another state whose reaction is, “Holy cow! Who cares. It’s Alabama, and I live in the middle of New York City (or some other city). Doesn’t affect me. Besides, look at all those outsiders coming into our town, expecting police protection while they tour the Met or Broadway. Who pays for those police? Yep, I, a New Yorker, do. And what about all those outlying people who share our municipal sewage and water systems. ‘Tax ‘em,’ I say.”
Ah! Modern civilization. The Founding Fathers are probably scratching their skulls. “What have we created?” they ask. “All this, all this big country, started out because we didn’t want to pay taxes to an absentee colonial landlord, one whose reach extended not just five miles beyond England, but thousands of miles.”
Ah! Modern dilemmas. A complex society gets more complex by the day, it seems. And one of the reasons is the conflict arising from neighboring jurisdictions. But isn’t that the way of the world. Isn’t there always the conflict of jurisdictions? If not taxing jurisdictions, then social ones, or even personal ones. Is a continuing problem in human affairs the conflict of people with overlapping spaces, literal and figurative?
Do we all need the oversight of some “Department of Examiners of Public Accounts” to keep us under control, to stave off social chaos? Can’t we do it on our own? Can’t we keep order without outside policing over which we have no control, that is, policing to which we must submit or things as we know them will fall apart?
The territorial imperatives that drive so many of us to protect also drive us to increase our territories or prohibit others from using what we believe we own exclusively. Conflict from such expansion seems, to me, to be inevitable. It’s a problem that occupied the minds of the Founding Fathers as they wrestled with Federal vs State control. That problem has never been completely resolved, with the larger entity incessantly seeking more power and reach and the smaller entities doing what they can to protect their autonomy. It’s the stuff of tribal warfare run wild. So, yes, as a Pennsylvanian, I’m interested in an Alabama law because it encapsulates one problem that persists in American society, if not in all societies.
Beaches. Now, there are the places that exemplify the conflict. Some beaches are designated “private” whereas others are called “public.” The homeowners who pay high taxes for their beachfront properties want exclusive use of their beaches right down to the neap tide low water line. In Rhode Island, the mean high tide line is a boundary above which visitors can’t trespass onto the beachfront property owners’ land. ** Fines accompany such intrusions. The push to eliminate those fines, which are essentially taxes imposed on outsiders has been met with angry homeowners’ complaints. “We pay the taxes. Why should others use our land?”
And one can see the dilemma. What if visitors—outsiders—pollute the beach or destroy dunes? The homeowners lose both the quality of their beach lives or the safety provided by dunes. The local authority provides policing. Why should locals pay for policing those who use their beachfronts? Homeowners see the elimination of the fines as a mechanism for stealing their property, property by the way, that a single hurricane can obliterate by washing it into the sea. But that’s not the only problem: In a litigious society, beachfront homeowners could be held liable for strangers who suffer an accident on their beaches.
The dilemma of those who enforce laws within prescribed boundaries is that physical boundaries vary because of natural processes, and imposed boundaries are arbitrary and result from agreements or battles of one kind or another, hot fights or cold diplomacy. Mean high tide line is an example of a shifting natural boundary. If it were up to the homeowners in Rhode Island, their properties would extend into the littoral zone, giving them control of the surf. If it were up to the beach visitors, the public area would extend from surf to dune, and no one would pay a fine for simply walking on the beach or fishing in the surf at high tide.
I wrote above that territorial imperatives that drive so many of us also drive us to increase our territories or prohibit others from using what we believe we own exclusively. That applies to thought and knowledge, also. I remember an esteemed colleague returning from a meeting of science department heads shaking his own head and saying he encountered an unusual form of the territorial imperative. In devising a new curriculum in the earth sciences, he had included a bibliography germane to the courses. In that list of books were ecology and biology books. A colleague in the Biology Department objected, arguing that those were biology books and not matter for earth scientists to consider. This, mind you, was in a university. Knowledge, it seems, is owned. It’s an intellectual territory to some, and no “outsider” has the right to it.
I can’t leave without an anecdote. During my years as a professor, I took students on many extended field trips. On one of those, I set the students to the task of seeing whether or not there was a correlation between beach particle size and the slope of a beach. The students used theodolites to determine slope and collected beach materials for later size analysis. As we traveled along the East Coast from beach to beach, we came across one in New Jersey that was designated private, the entrance to which was guarded by college-age people sitting at a desk to collect fees or to restrict entrance. Of like age to my students, the “guards” were amenable to our brief excursion onto the beach for a college assignment. While on the beach with their tripods, theodolites, stadia rods, clip boards, and collecting baggies, one group of the students was approached by a lady who said, “Now, I’m on the beach committee, and I need to know what you are doing.” A quick-witted student looked at her and said, “Why, ma’am, we’re measuring for the bridge.” She went away puzzled, probably headed to call the other committee members to ask about the bridge. No doubt she didn’t consider that it would have been a bridge to Africa.
But I can understand her side of the issue and the side of the Rhode Island beachfront homeowners. The society is set up on jurisdictions, and the jurisdictions are set up on boundaries. It’s the nature of societies from tribal units through cities, to states, and federal governments to guard what they have and extend when they can. That the principle of jurisdiction applied to a set of biology reference books just indicates how deep the need to control and extend territories is in the human psyche.
Is the lesson here a Buddhist expression? “Do not look for a sanctuary in anyone except yourself (or, your Self).”
*https://legiscan.com/AL/text/SB107/id/2266139 Accessed February 25, 2021.
**Nunes, Alex. 24 Feb 2021. Private property owners ‘utterly outraged’ by bill to decriminalize shoreline trespassing. Online at https://thepublicsradio.org/article/private-property-owners-utterly-outraged-by-bill-to-decriminalize-shoreline-trespassing- Accessed February 25 2021.
Here’s the gist of Alabama Senate Bill 107. “Under existing law, the planning jurisdiction of a municipality, including the approval of subdivisions, extends for five miles from the corporate limits” (ll. 22-25 p. 1). * Senate Bill 107 would reduce or eliminate that reach.
Here’s the effect of the law. If someone lives in a suburb of a city or even a town of 6,000, and wants to put a pink flamingo statue in the yard, but the city has an ordinance against pink flamingo statues, then the city authorities, the policing authority of the city, can impose a fine on the home owner if the house lies within that five-mile radius of the larger municipality. Apparently, the current law which SB 107 replaces would extend police jurisdiction and with it the right to collect taxes to support the police. “This bill [107] would also provide for audit by the Department of Examiners of Public Accounts of any expenditure by a municipality of funds derived from taxes and fees levied within its police jurisdiction” (ll. 1-3 p. 2).
Now, you might be a city dweller in another state whose reaction is, “Holy cow! Who cares. It’s Alabama, and I live in the middle of New York City (or some other city). Doesn’t affect me. Besides, look at all those outsiders coming into our town, expecting police protection while they tour the Met or Broadway. Who pays for those police? Yep, I, a New Yorker, do. And what about all those outlying people who share our municipal sewage and water systems. ‘Tax ‘em,’ I say.”
Ah! Modern civilization. The Founding Fathers are probably scratching their skulls. “What have we created?” they ask. “All this, all this big country, started out because we didn’t want to pay taxes to an absentee colonial landlord, one whose reach extended not just five miles beyond England, but thousands of miles.”
Ah! Modern dilemmas. A complex society gets more complex by the day, it seems. And one of the reasons is the conflict arising from neighboring jurisdictions. But isn’t that the way of the world. Isn’t there always the conflict of jurisdictions? If not taxing jurisdictions, then social ones, or even personal ones. Is a continuing problem in human affairs the conflict of people with overlapping spaces, literal and figurative?
Do we all need the oversight of some “Department of Examiners of Public Accounts” to keep us under control, to stave off social chaos? Can’t we do it on our own? Can’t we keep order without outside policing over which we have no control, that is, policing to which we must submit or things as we know them will fall apart?
The territorial imperatives that drive so many of us to protect also drive us to increase our territories or prohibit others from using what we believe we own exclusively. Conflict from such expansion seems, to me, to be inevitable. It’s a problem that occupied the minds of the Founding Fathers as they wrestled with Federal vs State control. That problem has never been completely resolved, with the larger entity incessantly seeking more power and reach and the smaller entities doing what they can to protect their autonomy. It’s the stuff of tribal warfare run wild. So, yes, as a Pennsylvanian, I’m interested in an Alabama law because it encapsulates one problem that persists in American society, if not in all societies.
Beaches. Now, there are the places that exemplify the conflict. Some beaches are designated “private” whereas others are called “public.” The homeowners who pay high taxes for their beachfront properties want exclusive use of their beaches right down to the neap tide low water line. In Rhode Island, the mean high tide line is a boundary above which visitors can’t trespass onto the beachfront property owners’ land. ** Fines accompany such intrusions. The push to eliminate those fines, which are essentially taxes imposed on outsiders has been met with angry homeowners’ complaints. “We pay the taxes. Why should others use our land?”
And one can see the dilemma. What if visitors—outsiders—pollute the beach or destroy dunes? The homeowners lose both the quality of their beach lives or the safety provided by dunes. The local authority provides policing. Why should locals pay for policing those who use their beachfronts? Homeowners see the elimination of the fines as a mechanism for stealing their property, property by the way, that a single hurricane can obliterate by washing it into the sea. But that’s not the only problem: In a litigious society, beachfront homeowners could be held liable for strangers who suffer an accident on their beaches.
The dilemma of those who enforce laws within prescribed boundaries is that physical boundaries vary because of natural processes, and imposed boundaries are arbitrary and result from agreements or battles of one kind or another, hot fights or cold diplomacy. Mean high tide line is an example of a shifting natural boundary. If it were up to the homeowners in Rhode Island, their properties would extend into the littoral zone, giving them control of the surf. If it were up to the beach visitors, the public area would extend from surf to dune, and no one would pay a fine for simply walking on the beach or fishing in the surf at high tide.
I wrote above that territorial imperatives that drive so many of us also drive us to increase our territories or prohibit others from using what we believe we own exclusively. That applies to thought and knowledge, also. I remember an esteemed colleague returning from a meeting of science department heads shaking his own head and saying he encountered an unusual form of the territorial imperative. In devising a new curriculum in the earth sciences, he had included a bibliography germane to the courses. In that list of books were ecology and biology books. A colleague in the Biology Department objected, arguing that those were biology books and not matter for earth scientists to consider. This, mind you, was in a university. Knowledge, it seems, is owned. It’s an intellectual territory to some, and no “outsider” has the right to it.
I can’t leave without an anecdote. During my years as a professor, I took students on many extended field trips. On one of those, I set the students to the task of seeing whether or not there was a correlation between beach particle size and the slope of a beach. The students used theodolites to determine slope and collected beach materials for later size analysis. As we traveled along the East Coast from beach to beach, we came across one in New Jersey that was designated private, the entrance to which was guarded by college-age people sitting at a desk to collect fees or to restrict entrance. Of like age to my students, the “guards” were amenable to our brief excursion onto the beach for a college assignment. While on the beach with their tripods, theodolites, stadia rods, clip boards, and collecting baggies, one group of the students was approached by a lady who said, “Now, I’m on the beach committee, and I need to know what you are doing.” A quick-witted student looked at her and said, “Why, ma’am, we’re measuring for the bridge.” She went away puzzled, probably headed to call the other committee members to ask about the bridge. No doubt she didn’t consider that it would have been a bridge to Africa.
But I can understand her side of the issue and the side of the Rhode Island beachfront homeowners. The society is set up on jurisdictions, and the jurisdictions are set up on boundaries. It’s the nature of societies from tribal units through cities, to states, and federal governments to guard what they have and extend when they can. That the principle of jurisdiction applied to a set of biology reference books just indicates how deep the need to control and extend territories is in the human psyche.
Is the lesson here a Buddhist expression? “Do not look for a sanctuary in anyone except yourself (or, your Self).”
*https://legiscan.com/AL/text/SB107/id/2266139 Accessed February 25, 2021.
**Nunes, Alex. 24 Feb 2021. Private property owners ‘utterly outraged’ by bill to decriminalize shoreline trespassing. Online at https://thepublicsradio.org/article/private-property-owners-utterly-outraged-by-bill-to-decriminalize-shoreline-trespassing- Accessed February 25 2021.
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