Tonight i was listening to the radio on my way home from work and just happened to change the station to KEXO 1230 and hear an interview on a program that i had never heard before. Chris Plante was interviewing Scott Lingamfelter (R). Lingamfelter is running for Virginia's Lieutenant Governor in 2013. The topic was one Martha Boneta, who lives and farms in Virginia and is having her property rights encroached upon. To sum up, Boneta sells items out of her home that she has made using materials that come from her farm (chiefly items crocheted from llama wool and candles made from beeswax it sounded like). She has a business license and this isn't against the law for the way her property is zoned. She also hosted a small birthday party for the daughter of a friend: 8 ten year olds. The neighbors complained, the county fined her without any investigation. To appeal she had to put out $1000 and she lost!
Plante and Lingamfelter had apparently discussed Boneta on the program last fall (!) but i have found very little on the subject online. Earlier today Lingamfelter introduced the Boneta Bill to hopefully prevent anything like this ever happening again. Where's the mainstream media on this? They don't seem to be making a peep. Searching for "Martha Boneta" on the CBS, NBC, ABC, and CNN websites yielded nothing: outragous. FoxNews covered it.
I'm still doing some research but here's the articles i've read about it so far:
Announcement about the announcement of the bill (talks about Boneta in paragraphs three, five through ten).
article quoting Boneta and Lingamfelter
another article: apparently part of the dispute is an erroneous claim that some of the items she was selling were not produced by her farm!
The reason this matters to me: i'm about to start a garden and i've had it in the back of my mind for a couple of years now that it might be nice to have llamas or rabbits to produce and/or sell my own wool. I can barely make ends meet right now, i can't imagine going through getting a business license only to get fined $5000 for doing what i bought the license for and them sneakily changing the law behind my back after the fact. This is ridiculous, it shouldn't be allowed to happen at all.
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