Little Girl’s Playset Is in Her Own Backyard, City Wants It Destroyed Anyway

Fellow
libertarians, we may be observing peak bureaucratic cruelty in
Santa Fe Springs, California. City officials told Jessica Torres
and Felix Miranda to destroy their backyard playset—a gift to their
handicapped 10-year-old daughter from the
Make-A-Wish-Foundation—because it is a “public nuisance,” according
to
CBSLA.com.

Young Tiffany suffers from seizures and can’t play at the public
park, so the Make-A-Wish-Foundation gifted her a personal
playground. It sits in her backyard, on Miranda family property.
Nevertheless, the city thinks it has the right to force the family
to disassemble the playset. When Torres approached a city official,
she was treated as courteously as would be expected by anyone else
who has ever gone up against the tyranny of local government.
According to CBSLA.com:

“When I asked the city, ‘So where do you expect my daughter to
play?’ they said ‘Well, the city’s not responsible for your
daughter’s disability,’” Torres said. “They said ‘Your Tiffany is
not our problem.’”

The city’s rationale for ruining a little girl’s happiness is
that the playground area is cluttered and dangerous. Local
reporters called shenanigans on that verdict:

But Torres, who’s an oncology charge nurse at Beverly Hospital
in Montebello, showed CBS2/KCAL9 reporter Adrianna Weingold the
backyard, front yard and the inside of the family’s home and things
looked relatively neat and tidy.

Torres showed Weingold some of the tickets the city’s issued,
calling on the family to remove all items from the backyard and
front yard, including all playground equipment.

After Weingold approached city officials, they changed their
story. Now it’s perfectly fine to keep the personal playground up
and running, they said—despite what is explicitly printed on the
numerous tickets the Miranda family received for hosting
unauthorized fun in the privacy of their own backyard.