The following would make a classic textbook example of how local governments operate, or even what local governments do:
The commissioners of the Town of Sylva supposed some time ago that they needed zoning. This would likely have been based either on the supposition that the role of government is to control growth or on the axiom that everybody else is doing it. Zoning supplants the notion that the government of this country is based on the principle of property rights with the idea that election to office qualifies a gifted few to micromanage everybody else.
It is common knowledge that zoning only applies to the bourgeoisie, as anybody wealthy enough to afford a good lawyer can get a variance. The wealthiest of the wealthy can even change the laws to personalize zoning ordinances. Jackson Paper Company wanted to build a new smokestack as tall as the one that had been grandfathered in by the zoning ordinances. It was therefore proposed that the ordinances be changed to allow it. No reason was given as to why the old smokestack was too tall, how many people had suffered as a consequence of its height, or the nature of their ailments.
Environmental activists are adept at applying three tools: (1) They disseminate frightening sound bites to people who will not take the effort to verify the information but will show up in a panic at public meetings, (2) They call for an environmental study that takes a lot of time and is almost guaranteed to turn up a rare species, (3) They find a technical glitch and sue. In the case of Jackson Paper, the Canary Coalition sued the Town of Sylva, not on the grounds that the smokestacks would cause asthma and death in small children, not because they would marginalize local growers by casting shadows, not because the smokestacks were so ugly they caused convulsions and incontrollable vomiting – but because the town fathers had committed the unpardonable sin of omitting information in the public notices. Similarly, citizens in Buncombe County were recently able to postpone countywide zoning, not because it was un-Constitutional, but because the county commissioners missed a noticing deadline.
In the case of Jackson Paper, the courts ruled that what had been printed sufficed.
