Sacramento County Says It’s Illegal to Work on Your Own Car in Your Own Garage

Overlawyered ^ | July 9, 2019 | Walter Olson

[Leaning Right]

It’s common for communities to use zoning codes to exclude commercial and industrial uses from residential areas, but Sacramento County, California, seems extra-zealous about making sure that residents don’t try to operate auto repair businesses amid homes. While it concedes to residents the right to perform minor auto repairs on their own cars in their driveway or garage, it bans repairs or maintenance in any of the following circumstances...

[Leaning Right]

Here are the circumstances (evidently, any one of them will get you fined):

1. Using tools not normally found in a residence;

2. Conducted on vehicles registered to persons, not currently residing on the lot or parcel;

3. Conducted outside a fully enclosed garage and resulting in any vehicle being inoperable for a period in excess of twenty-four hours.

It can be argued that this law is meant to prevent someone from operating a car repair shop on his front lawn. But at the same time, if you’re simply working on your own car in your own driveway, you had better get it done in less than a day. And you had better not be using any exotic tools.

And don’t even think about working on a relative’s car.

[Kickass Conservative]

Of course you can’t, where would the Illegal Invaders living in your Garage go?

[Brilliant]

No one does that anymore anyway. Unless it’s an old car.

[ConservaTexan]

“ But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government...” DOI, 1776

[NonValueAdded]

So the county has turned into one big HOA

[bgill]

Illegals deserve more than a garage. The self identified couples should have your master bedroom and its en suite while the grey bearded 15 year olds could bunk with your sons and daughters.

[bgill]

Even TX is turning into one big HOA.

[Larry Lucido]

Sacramento County Says It’s Illegal to Work on Your Own Car in Your Own Garage

Not defending Sacramento County, but the headline doesn't match the article. Apparently, it IS legal to work on your OWN care IN your garage (sometimes).

[faucetman]

Your observation is absolutely correct.

I would make one slight change.

And you had better not be using any tools.

[PGalt]

Exactly. List of grievances BUMP!

[sasquatch]

So much for that pesky constitution.

[Yaelle]

But you can still screw lobbyists at 3 hour boozy lunches?

[Macoozie]

“Noone does thst anymore, unless its and car”

You’ve claimed the most ignorant arsehole award.
Lots of folks do it everyday.
Its called a hobby.
Or practiced by enthusiasts.
Or Gearheads, Motorheads etc.

[cherry]

the face of the future....

when it all comes down, if Trump can't prevent it, there will also be no home schooling and probably no religious schools.....

[faucetman]

“No one does that anymore anyway. Unless it’s an old car.”

I DO! and I don’t have a garage! I do it OUTSIDE in my driveway. The only time one of my cars goes to the dealers is if the repair is under warranty or recall. (read FREE)

[Macoozie]

“Noone does that anymore, unless its an old car”

You’ve claimed the most ignorant arsehole of the day award.
Lots of folks do it everyday.
Its called a hobby.
Or practiced by enthusiasts.
Or Gearheads, Motorheads etc.

[nathanbedford]

Here is a contrary view from 2015:

The next time an article gets posted about overpopulation and the swarm of reflex posters reappears pooh-poohing the problems of overpopulation, consider this kerfuffle which is really quite trivial.

Our conception of property rights was created at a time when America was a vast wilderness and we only sparsely populated a thin strip along the Atlantic coast. To the west was a vast fastness of wilderness where one could go, clear the land, live out of sight and out of mind of our neighbors and dispose of our property as we individually and alone saw fit. Today we are a country of 315 million people, the population has more than doubled in my lifetime, much of that population increase consists of people who do not share my culture, my language, my very Teutonic conception of orderliness, my sense of civic responsibility.

So people who are as tight-assed as I am seek to have their environment ordered according to their lights. I don't want my neighbor's front yard to have a disused toilet bowl as a planter, I do not want to see his car up on blocks, I do not want him posting commercial signs. In short I want him to have a nice, well groomed, Protestant appearance to his half-acre.

I do not live in the wilderness, I grew up in a leafy suburban upper-middle-class town built largely after World War II. I cannot escape my neighbor therefore I must regulate him but because I need to regulate him I must equally submit myself to regulation. There is the rub.

I am afflicted with normal human nature, I want my neighbor to be regulated according to my tastes but I want to be free of the appearance police myself. When my neighbor is regulated it is to keep property values up but when I am regulated it is fascism on the hoof.

Not only are we imprisoning ourselves in gated gulags in order to avoid the onrush of population which doubles every century, we are desperately trying to protect ourselves from foreign and alien cultures who do not conceive of well manicured lawns as a desirable or even normal way of living. We can no longer flee these people by going into the wilderness, we can only regulate them.

These are the problems that come with population and with immigration. When we try to solve them with regulation we inevitably trade away our freedoms.

[Leaning Right]

> No one does that anymore anyway. Unless it’s an old car. <

Good point. But the law is so strict that it is (evidently) illegal for you to change the air filter on a friend’s car on your own property.

Now, would a cop stop and fine you for that? No. Oh, wait a minute. This is California. Maybe they would. Gotta keep the revenue coming in.

[kingu]

Live in a tent on the levee? No problem. Live in a motor home that obviously hasn’t moved in 3 months? No problem. Use a torque wrench at home: $430 fine.

Code enforcement has two choices - go after people they’re told they can’t touch who ignore them anyway and keep on doing whatever they want, or go after middle class homeowners who are violating some perhaps well intentioned but utterly excessive law.

Guess who gets the tickets from code enforcement? And this is a sequence repeated each and every day across the country.

[wally_bert]

Doing much of anything to a modern day set of wheels is pretty much over for the average joe.

I barely have the time and energy to work on my own old stuff.