A Florida judge yesterday ruled against a Lantana homeowner who faces more than $165,000 in fines for three minor code violations that did not harm anyone. Sandy Martinez, represented by the Institute for Justice (IJ), argued that the financially crippling claim, which stems from cracks in her driveway, a storm-damaged fence and cars partially parked on her lawn, violates the Florida Constitution’s ban on excessive fines and the guarantee of fair trials. But Judge Luis Delgado of the Palm Beach County Circuit Court granted the city’s motion for summary judgment, concluding that the fines were not “grossly disproportionate.”
Martinez hopes to convince Florida’s Fourth District Court of Appeals that Delgado is wrong on this one. “Six-figure fines for parking on your own property are outrageous,” says IJ attorney Mike Greenberg. “The Excessive Fines Clause of the Florida Constitution was designed to stop precisely this kind of abuse, to prevent people from being fined penniless for trivial violations. The court’s opinion renders these fundamental protections a dead letter. We will appeal.”
Martinez’s debt to the city began piling up in 2013, when she was cited for cracks in her driveway. For a single mother with a modest income living paycheck to paycheck, the cost of laying a new driveway was difficult to manage. But in the meantime, daily fines of $75 continued to pile up, eventually totaling $16,125 with interest — “much more than the cost of an entirely new driveway,” he notes in the lawsuit he filed against the city in February 2021 .
In 2015, Martinez was cited for a fence that was knocked down by a storm. Once again, the repairs needed to bring it into compliance were more expensive than he could immediately afford. As he waited for his insurance company to pay his fence settlement, daily fines of $125 piled up, eventually totaling $47,375 with interest — “several times the cost of repairs and substantially more than the cost of a completely fenced fence.” new,” according to his complaint.
Finally, Martinez was cited in 2019 for improperly parking cars on her property. At the time she lived with her three children, her mother and her sister. Martinez, his two adult children and her sister all had cars that they used to travel from home to work and back. Her street has no curbs and is not wide enough to accommodate parked cars. Since Martinez and her relatives couldn’t legally and safely park on the street, the driveway seemed like the only viable option. When all four cars were parked at Martinez’s home, two of them sometimes extended slightly beyond the driveway, which is flanked by lawn and a driveway.
As Martinez’s complaint points out, “parking in your own front yard space, even a small portion, is illegal in Lantana.” The fine is $250 per day and the fines continue to pile up until a city inspector verifies that the violation has been corrected. Although Martinez says he promptly resolved the parking problem by making sure no cars touched the grass and left a voicemail at the code enforcement office requesting a compliance check, no inspector showed up. Unbeknownst to him, the fines continued to pile up for more than a year.
When the city deigned to acknowledge that the parking problem had been resolved, Martinez’s complaint says, the total bill was $101,750, “nearly four times his annual income.” Martinez understandably thinks that “it’s ridiculous that Lantana is charging me more than $100,000 for parking on my lawn that I paid for.”
The city’s concern about cars parked on grass appears to be strangely selective. City officials suggested that Martinez could solve the problem by parking one or more cars in the grassy area between the sidewalk and the street. He rejected this option because he lives at the intersection of two busy roads where traffic accidents are common. “Just a month or two after the case was filed,” Greenberg says, “there was a three-car crash” at that intersection, and photos showed that “if a car had been parked where the city suggested parking , would have been seriously damaged.” But for the city, parking entirely on public grass was perfectly acceptable, while parking on one’s own lawn, even a little, was intolerable.
Greenberg notes another counterintuitive distinction the city makes between parking on public and private property. If you illegally park a car on the street, that violation triggers a one-time fine; the city can’t fine you again unless it verifies that you didn’t move the car. But if you illegally park a car on your property, Greenberg says, “they just assume the violation will continue indefinitely until an inspector comes out and confirms it’s no longer ongoing.” And meanwhile the daily fines accumulate.
This approach, IJ argues, violates the right to a fair trial. In fact, Greenberg says, the city “treats every day as an independent crime” without “proof that the crime actually occurred.”
Given Martinez’s financial circumstances, the city ultimately offered her to settle the bill by paying $25,000. But at the time, Greenberg says, it was “over half of her annual income” and “the offer was only good for about three months.” Because it “couldn’t come up with that $25,000 in three months,” she says, the city again asked for the full $165,250.
These sanctions are not excessive, Delgado concludes in his 10-page order. But before answering that question, he blames Martinez for not attending code enforcement hearings. Greenberg notes that the hearings were scheduled “on weekdays around 5:30 p.m.,” which made it difficult for Martinez to attend given his work and parenting responsibilities. In any case, he says, the sole purpose of the hearings was to ascertain whether violations had occurred, which Martinez did not dispute.
There were unquestionably cracks in Martinez’s driveway, her fence had definitely been blown down by a storm, and she admitted that car tires had impermissibly touched her lawn. Her argument was that the resulting sanctions were not commensurate with those violations.
If that’s what Martinez thought, Delgado says, he should have contested the fines in circuit court within 30 days of making the “final decision,” as required by law. Greenberg says holding Martinez to that deadline “doesn’t make sense when the fines keep rolling in and we don’t know what the final amount will be.” For driveway and fence violations, fines continued to pile up “until she [could] save the money to fix the problem.” And Martinez says she thought she had taken care of the parking violation until she discovered, more than a year later, that no one in the city had verified her compliance. At that point, the initially modest bill he had reached six figures.
Delgado was not troubled by those complications. Because Martinez didn’t meet the 30-day deadline, he says, he gave up the right to argue that city code enforcement is unconstitutional in his case, which would amount to “a collateral attack on an ordinance addressing issues that could have be adequately raised.” on appeal.” As Delgado sees it, this means that Martinez can only argue that Lantana’s code enforcement system is unconstitutional on its face, meaning that “there is no set of circumstances” under which enforcement ordinance would be constitutional.The meaning of that distinction is unclear, however, because Delgado finally appears to consider whether Lantana’s fine system is unconstitutional as applied to Martinez.
“Fines are excessive when they shock the conscience and are unreasonably harsh or oppressive sanctions in proportion to the violations to be remedied,” Delgado writes, but “substantial deference should be given to the legislature’s determination of an appropriate fine.” The fines imposed on Martinez, he says, “were well within the range deemed appropriate.”
Even considering the accumulation of fines and interest, Delgado says, the amount Martinez owes “is not grossly disproportionate to his crime.” He argues that “the fines are proportionate to the damage caused, meaning that the violations have lasted for several years.” In other words, Delgado believes it is reasonable to penalize Martinez for his failure to make repairs that he could not immediately afford and for his mistake in thinking that the parking violation had been resolved.
Delgado mentions Martinez’s assertion that Lantana’s order “violates due process because it establishes unlimited sanctions that led to the specific sanctions at issue.” But he doesn’t address the contention that Lantana imposes those “unlimited fines” by presuming ongoing code violations without proof of them.
After addressing Martinez’s specific claims of discomfort and disproportionality after saying it was too late to raise them, Delgado applies the stricter requirements for a facial challenge. “While the fines imposed are indeed large, the code and statute itself are not inherently arbitrary, discriminatory, or oppressive,” he says, and Martinez “has failed to demonstrate that there is no set of circumstances under which the acts would be valid. “
Greenberg believes Delgado’s deference to legislative wisdom is out of place in the context of a constitutional challenge like this. If the legislature’s determination of appropriate sanctions is the only test, he asks, “why have constitutional protections in the first place?” The central purpose of these safeguards, he notes, is “to protect us from legislative intrusions.”
Fines like these are “not just abusive,” says IJ attorney Ari Bargil. “They are also unconstitutional. We look forward to continuing this fight on Sandy’s behalf to ensure that all Floridians can be free from astronomical fines like those imposed by Lantana in this case.”