Which is fine.
But the guy in this situation did cede some of his control when he purchased property inside a HOA. At closing, he signed a document in which he committed to following a certain set of rules. He could have bought any number of houses, but chose to buy one in a HOA.
Now he complains about the ramifications of his own decision. It isn't like HOA's magically appear overnight and catch residents by surprise.
As someone said, make your choices and live with them.
I don't know where people keep getting the idea that this is an HOA rule. The Town of Hempstead issued the ticket. They don't issue citations for violations of HOA rules. Also, I'm not aware of any HOA developments in Oceanside. It's been around and pretty much fully built up for a long time.
Hempstead is a town on the South Shore of Nassau County, in the Southwestern portion of Long Island. In New York's municipal hierarchy, a town ranks between a village or an unincorporated area (usually called a "hamlet"), and the county. It has roughly the same authority as a city.
In this case, Hempstead happens to be the largest town in New York State. In fact, if it ever decided to become a city, it would be the second-largest city in New York, right behind New York City. So just because it's a "town" doesn't mean we're talking about Mayberry. It's a large municipal body -- and they don't go around enforcing HOA rules.
Mr. Guretzky lives in Oceanside, which is an unincorporated hamlet in Hempstead and therefore has no government of its own. The town, therefore, has direct jurisdiction, and it was the town that issued the ticket. (If Mr. Guretzky lived in an incorporated village, then the stricter of either the village's or the town's codes would apply.)
I rather doubt that Hempstead has any specific code against parking an airplane in one's driveway. It's possible, though: The former Mitchel Air Force Base / Mitchel Field (now Nassau Community College) is located within its borders, so possibly such a code was enacted at some point when some other pilot tried the same thing. But I rather doubt it.
More likely the code enforcement officer creatively interpreted some other obscure code to cover airplanes in driveways because some obnoxious busybody neighbor wouldn't stop whining until something was done about it. Long Islanders do like to complain: My father was once cited because a neighbor didn't like his shrubbery. The ticket was dismissed as baseless, of course. But it's pretty common for code enforcement officers to write up baseless tickets just to shut up some pain in the ass resident who won't stop calling and complaining. So they write the ticket and make it the court's problem instead.
It'll be interesting to see how this one plays out in court.
Rich
