Your front-page picture and accompanying story really are something that needs to be included with my pending appeal, regarding this incredibly expensive and highly intrusive, unnecessary action, taken and executed by this current Maple Lake City Council. Your picture shows proof of the blunder, regarding city actions leading to my appeal: an antique metal gate awaiting placement is in no way, capable of “harboring vermin” and certainly is in no way “junk or garbage,” determining terminology criteria considered necessary for any required abatement removal proposal with Junk Masters and/or Judge Geoffrey Tenney’s court order. This picture illustrates city-folly as they unlawfully, outside of contract agreement, and totally outside of any valid court order interpretation, was used by the city to justify their stealing and holding for ransom: construction materials awaiting disposition, museum static display/exhibit items, flea market inventory, consignment items, donated and loaned items, operable vehicles with collector plates holding no storage, previously council approved trailers used for storage, etc. Imagine toppling a screening wall in place for many years to screen a summer kitchen at my residence, taking all the fallen bricks and granite tops off picnic tables, to put their thumb on the scale and weigh down dumpsters with an excessive weight charge, destroying and loading whole trailers into other dumpsters, stealing railroad jacks, antique oil barrels, electric work tools including radial arm saws, bundles of expensive cedar shingles for log cabin repair, etc., just because they think they can, with their vague yet impowering court order and with their total disrespect for their agreement with the city.
My pending appeal has just been responded to by our city attorney, without denying validity and substance of hardly any of the above but instead, focused on alleged technical violations such as possible missing deadlines, amateur filing of complaints without legal counsel oversight and perhaps most importantly, total disdain for my not being able to hire an attorney to defend myself, this being a civil and not a criminal matter where I could have a highly qualified public defender with experience dealing with city indiscretion, lack of common sense and political maneuvering. For the record:
• My two properties were in conformance with previous council requests, regarding alleged “nuisance issues,” when John Rivers, Deb Geyen, and according to them, others, started agitating for nuisance abatement of my two properties because THEIR property values were being lowered, because of my “junk yard(s)” and apparently undocumented, “vermin.” Haack’s properties need to be “bulldozed,” according to Rivers. They both tried to recruit others for their cause, with very little success.
• The city took the issue from there and authorized a very flawed abatement action under a highly disputed nuisance ordinance condemned by previous city administrators and others as needing to be replaced, perhaps with the League of Minnesota Cities” Model Nuisance Ordinance.”
• The city apparently intended to apply the costs directly to me, the property owner, and so threatened until it was apparent that costs were ridiculously high and that potentially, the action could fall of city taxpayers. Here is where they failed to follow established policy, where city improvements such as streets, public improvements, nuisance abatements, etc., must start with a public hearing for those potentially affected taxpayers to have an opportunity, to either support or oppose any such action. Based on John Rivers and Deb Geyen’s arguments that their property values would positively benefit from such an abatement, the city failed to include them in this public notice and taking their argument further, failed to include ALL city taxpayers as beneficiaries of such potential actions.
• City Attorney Bob Alsop was at first receptive to my suggestion that all alleged “nuisance items” proposed for storage with Junk Masters at their highly inflated ransom price in some secret location, until I paid the proposed quarter of a million dollar price for their threatened “clean up,” could be stored in two forty foot “storage container units,” that I could purchase for $2000 each and place on my property, like other such units throughout our city, or like a previous council authorized me to do with trailers on my museum “loading dock.” He came back to say he was wrong, that would be against current city code, and so he now guessed, the city would have to serve notice on others using such storage, to remove or have their units confiscated.
• The latest wrinkle in this whole sordid affair is that, now Mr. Alsop has chosen to cite me for “contempt of court,” for trying to save what I could, which was being destroyed on site by junk masters, unceremoniously thrown into dumpsters to probably be thrown into a landfill, if I failed to pay that city ransom of a quarter of a million dollars, all in direct violation of their contract with the city, to carefully preserve what they took and hold secure, for a designated time. My advice from law enforcement who I called several times to witness what was happening and to stop it, was met with, “we can’t do anything unless you get a countermanding court order, so take lots of pictures.” My plea to the court was that a judge cannot overturn his previous order so the implication was, an appeal judge can.
John Haack
Maple Lake