Santa Clara Wine Country Becomes Fine Country

Michael and Kellie Ballard have owned Savannah-Chanelle Vineyards in Santa Clara County, California, for nearly 30 years. The Ballards own about 60 acres of relatively remote land that includes a rolling hillside vineyard, winery buildings, a babbling brook, and a redwood forest.

For the past 20 years, Marcelino Martinez has worked as the vineyard manager and become like family to the Ballards. In 2013, when Marcelino lost his lease on a nearby home, he asked the Ballards if he could move a trailer home onto an out-of-the-way part of their property.

He did so because Santa Clara County is one of the most expensive housing areas in the country. Zoning laws and other regulations have restricted housing availability and driven up costs. Many working-class people have already been driven out of the area. Without the Ballards’ help, Marcelino and his family too would have been forced to give up their good jobs and their children’s good school and move out of the area entirely. 

The Ballards gladly agreed to help the Martinez family.

Watch the case video!

But living in a trailer in Santa Clara County is technically illegal (though temporarily living in one is OK in some circumstances). When the county found out about the arrangement, the Ballards were faced with a horrible choice: either kick the Martinez family off their land or get fined every single day that the Martinez family lived there.

For the Ballards, the choice was easy: The Martinezes would stay. And they began the process of acquiring a legal home for the family. But delays due to permitting, COVID-19, and other issues meant that their plan has taken years to come to fruition.

During all that time, the county continued to fine them $100 per day. These fines ultimately reached a staggering $120,000. They were not imposed by a judge or a jury. Instead, a county official called a “hearing officer” levied them.

The Ballards have already spent years and tens of thousands of dollars—even when their business was closed for two years during the pandemic—getting all the expensive studies and permits the county requires just to put a home on the property. Massive fines on top of that serve no purpose.

IJ has now taken up the Ballards’ case. We are challenging the ruinous daily-accruing fines imposed on their charity that harmed no one—using their own property to provide a secluded and beautiful place for the Martinez family to live—as a violation of the Excessive Fines Clause. 

And this isn’t our first case involving administrative officials with consolidated power to write their own rules, impose penalties, and adjudicate disputes. We’ve filed three cases involving separation of powers in federal agencies. We’re now taking the fight to the local level by challenging the ability of county administrators, rather than judges and juries, to impose such fines.

Human kindness should not be illegal. The Ballards face outrageous fines just for providing safe, affordable housing for their long-time employee and his family in an area that government zoning regulations have already made prohibitively expensive. The Ballards haven’t hurt anyone; they cannot be fined for doing good.

Paul Avelar is the managing attorney of IJ’s Arizona office.