More Nanny State Government Intrusion & Shutdown: Girl Scout Criminals… Selling Cookies from Their Own Front Yard in Hazelwood, Missouri
Posted By Vicki McClure Davidson on March 24, 2011
Nanny State shutdown: Girl Scouts in Hazelwood, Missouri can't sell cookies from their front yard
With this attempted government shutdown of Girl Scouts selling cookies in front of their home in Missouri, I’m having a little girl’s lemonade stand/Nanny State flashback about now.
Remember this story from Oregon last summer?
The government said that 7-year-old Julie Murphy needed a $120 license for her little lemonade stand in Oregon
For the record, Hazelwood city spokesman Tim Davidson is NO relationship to me. Well, my fingers are crossed on that one.
From CBS St. Louis, UPDATE: Hazelwood Crackdown on Girl Scout Cookies:
HAZELWOOD, Mo. (KMOX/AP) – The city of Hazelwood says they do support the Girl Scouts but not when they are violating the home occupancy code.
They’d been warned, but the city says the Girl Scouts Abigail and Caitlin Mills continued to sell Girl Scout cookies from a stand in front of their home. A neighbor complained anonymously because of all the people and the traffic and the dogs barking at all the people and the traffic.
“Based on this complaint, the city of Hazelwood had to take action,” says spokesman Tim Davidson. He says it is also against city code to sell products from home.
And while he has heard some complaints from residents that Hazelwood is being too harsh on the teens, Davidson says others have pointed out that one tenet of the Girl Scouts is good citizenship.
“The fact that we did have this code in place, it’s the responsibility of every good citizen to respect the laws that we have,” said Davidson.
But the girls’ mother, Carolyn Mills, is vowing to let them keep selling their cookies, until they reach their goal of 2,000 purchases.
She says the cookie stand is equally important as a learning opportunity. “This is teaching leadership, communication, entrepreneurship,” Mills explains. “They’re getting to know the value of money, and how to keep people from ripping you off.”
Mills says the cookie stand has been a six year tradition, that started by chance. “We were parked in the driveway, counting the cookies in the back of the van, when suddenly a car pulled up and the driver asked if we had any extras,” explained Mills. “And then another car pulled up. And another.”
I’m no lawyer, but I’ve searched through Hazelwood’s online city codes and have yet to find the ordinance that Tim Davidson says prohibits commodity sales from a private home by a non-profit organization. Maybe I’m just missing it.
SECTION 605.070 in Hazelwood’s codes covers the license fees for businesses and occupations within the city. This shouldn’t apply to Girl Scout cookie sales because GS is an established non-profit and the girls aren’t actual business people running a business, but voluntary fundraisers. The bulk of the money for each box of cookies goes to the non-profit Girl Scouts of America organization and to the bakery — the remaining fraction goes to the selling troop for them to purchase supplies, field trips, and what-not, NOT ever to individual children in the troop.
No mention is made in the news article about Hazelwood residents being prevented by city officials from selling a car or sofa or Amway products or Avon or Mary Kay from their homes, nor run an eBay business. There are some stringent guidelines on garage sales, however.
Feels like selective law enforcement, but since I’ve not read the actual ordinance, I can’t form an informed opinion — my uninformed opinion is that Hazelwood city officials must have too much time on their hands. Unemployment in Missouri is at 9.4%, which is higher than the national average.
The “dogs barking” and “all the people and the traffic” complaints by the anonymous neighbor (too cowardly to talk to the mother, so instead, ran and tattled to the Nanny State bureaucracy) is just plain silly — how much traffic are we talking about with girls selling Girl Scout cookies from their front yard booth a few weeks a year? As a GS leader for seven years, we never had the lines of traffic implied here for cookies, and my troop did sell far more than 2,000 boxes several years in a row. These girls weren’t selling cookies from their front yard 24/7, so barking dogs should be the dog owner’s responsibility, not the girls’ — barking dogs during daylight hours is common and isn’t much of a nuisance, except for those people who work the graveyard shift or those who are miserable human beings who like to whine and complain and fink on young women who aren’t on welfare or aren’t getting into real trouble.
The Hazelwood ordinance needs to specifically exclude legitimate non-profits that sell a few weeks a year.
Reported by Riverfront Times, Hazelwood Shuts Down Girl Scout Cookie Stand:
Scandal! Local authorities have cracked down on two lawless rogues operating a high-volume commodities business out of their residence in Hazelwood! The scheming perpetrators were told to shut down their shady practice posthaste or otherwise face a court summons!
Yup, it’s true: The city of Hazelwood has told two kids they can no longer sell Girl Scout cookies in their driveway, according to a KMOV report.
The cookie sale, said Hazelwood spokesman Tim Davidson, “violates our home occupancy code, which states that people can’t sell commodities out of their home.”
No longer a problem now, since the cookies have all been reported sold. Update from STL Today:
HAZELWOOD • A Hazelwood woman said her teen daughters sold the last of their Girl Scout cookies this afternoon, despite the city’s warnings to cease cookie sales from a stand set up in their driveway.
Carolyn Mills said the remaining 36 boxes of cookies – worth $126 – were purchased around 3:15 by the Rev. George “The Shoeman” Hutchings. Hutchings, of Manchester, is known for collecting more than 156,000 pairs of shoes, trading them at 35 cents a pound and purchasing hydraulic drilling rigs to dig water wells in Kenya.
“He said he likes to help out Girl Scouts and couldn’t believe the city was doing something like this,” Mills said Wednesday afternoon by phone.
Mills’ daughters Abigail, 14, and Caitlin, 16, have run a cookie booth in their driveway at 8462 Latty Avenue for more than five years.
On March 7, Mills said she received a letter from Hazelwood’s code enforcement division informing her of a complaint about the cookie stand and warning them that selling products from their home violates city codes.
The blog In the brain… out through the fingers… weighs in: Girl Scout Cookies versus the heavy hand of Hazelwood, MO and over-reaching liberalism:
This has probably taught these girls all of that, but I’d be willing to bet that it taught them something even more important:
“A government big enough to give you everything you want, is strong enough to take everything you have.” Thomas Jefferson
While the government, indoctrination schools tell these girls how bad Capitalism is and how our glorious leader will lead them to the promised land of living in a Third World Economic country – they are seeing first-hand how their over-reaching, intrusive government is affecting their lives.
Conservatives can rant and rave all day about the evils of this intrusive government and those words will fall on deaf ears. Instances of meddling, even at this level, will do more to teach the young people who to look to for their future – Conservatives who believe in their right to pursue any opportunity to better themselves or liberals, who believe that these girls should be held down and forced to submit to governmental regulations which do nothing but limit and deprive them of their freedoms and liberties.
Yes, it is sad that these girls have to endure this, but I rejoice at the fact that there are now two more people (not counting all their friends) who will look at the leftist agenda with a jaded eye and not buy into the propaganda spewed by their NEA ‘educators’.
These same people will continue to rise up and say “Enough is ENOUGH!” to bureaucrats who live to write still more oppressive and freedom-robbing laws in order to further their own petty power-trips. It is one thing to lookout for our neighborhoods in order to make sure they are safe. it is something completely different to watch your neighbors in order to find something to use against them in a pursuit of denying them the pursuit of their life, liberty, and happiness.
About the author
Vicki,
Just a quick personal note of thanks for referencing my blog “In the brain…”. I do appreciate it and will be posting a link back to your blog. I also promise to get back to writing and making a nuisance of myself as much as possible again (I had gotten away from it for a while as I am also pursuing some other interests).
I like your perspective and the way you tell it like you see it.
Thank you,
Myles
An honor to meet you, Myles — thank you. Great post of yours, too.
