Jeff Guo
speaker
1,187 appearances
10 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2025
last heard 11 Sep
Jeff Guo’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 10 in all, peaking in Dec 2025 with 3.
Appearances
Now you're going to have to replace all these trees or pay the fee.
For 1,500 trees, the fee would come out to around half a million dollars.
This dispute makes the local news.
And from there, it quickly attracts the attention of a lawyer named Chance Weldon.
Chance had been looking for a case just like this.
Around 2018, Chance's property rights alarm bells were going off on account of these tree protection ordinances.
He'd watch them pop up all over the country, including where he lives in Texas.
To him, these towns were pretty obviously violating people's property rights.
And Chance agrees that a lot of these local regulations are important.
But he and the folks he works with think that modern zoning and permitting laws have gone too far.
He thinks a lot of them are unconstitutional, that they violate what is called the takings clause of the Fifth Amendment.
The basic idea here is the government can't force you to provide your property to the public for free.
Now, for more than 100 years, some people have been trying to argue that zoning and permitting laws violate the takings clause.
They're like, if the city is going to tell me what I can or can't build on my own property, it's basically acting like the city owns my property.
But mostly those arguments have not been that successful.
When he hears about the fight over the tree permits in Canton, Michigan, he reaches out to the attorney for the local property owners and offers to help them out for free.
Eventually, in 2021, one of those cases reaches the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals, which is one rung below the Supreme Court.
The township was like, no, this isn't about trying to force property owners to provide a benefit for free.
It's because when you take down a tree, that makes flooding worse.
It makes neighborhoods hotter.
Showing 521–540 of 1,187 · page 27 of 60
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