Last Meet for Old Council.

The City Council is scheduled to meet this evening in City Hall at 7:30. The agenda includes a vote on a couple of housekeeping ordinances, then a short recess will be held before newly elected Council members will be sworn in.

The new members include: Jim Statsenbarg, first term, Ward I; Steve Leibrand, first term, Ward III; Dan Rife, former Ward V council member, first term, Ward IV; John Cooper, former fire chief, first term Ward IV; Ed Hardesty, first term, Ward V.

Wayne Walter was elected to the Ward II position, but passed away prior to the election. Mayor Harris will nominate an appointee for a one year term in that post to be approved by the full Council.

A motion to accept the certified election results from the Jasper County Clerk is expected.

A resolution to express the City’s graditued for outgoing members Diane Sharits, Bill Welch, Wayne Campbell, Charlie Bastin, Jr. and Lee Carlson for their years of service on the Council is included in the Council packet.

Suburban Family Files Constitutional Challenge to City’s Ban on Front-Yard Cookie Stands

St. Louis, Missouri—Each February and March for the past six years Caitlin Mills, 16, and Abigail Mills, 14, have put a card table in front of their home in Hazelwood, Missouri, and sold Girl Scout cookies* to drivers passing by. This year, however, the City notified their mother, Carolyn Mills, that the girls’ cookie stand violated city ordinances and must be shut down.

Today, the Mills family filed suit in state court to ensure that children in Hazelwood and all over the state will be free to set up similar stands in their own front yards.

"It is a time-honored tradition for American children to set up a stand in the front yard and sell lemonade or baked goods to people passing by," said Dave Roland, the director of litigation for the Freedom Center of Missouri. "These stands are not only a fun way to pass a summer afternoon, they are frequently children’s first encounter with the basics of entrepreneurship, customer service, and money management."

Despite the fact that these stands are both common and harmless, recent years have seen a stream of news stories about one local government after another telling children that they must obtain special licenses and permits before setting up a stand – and some cities, such as Hazelwood, ban them entirely.

Still, notice of the city’s prohibition came as a surprise to Mrs. Mills. "It never even crossed my mind that my girls might need to get permission from the city before setting up their cookie stand," she said. "I was even more shocked when city officials told me that you couldn’t even get a permit for it."

The Mills family believes that if constitutional guarantees of property rights mean anything, they mean you should not need governmental permission before setting up something so harmless as a lemonade or cookie stand in your own yard. But the girls do not want people to mistake their disagreement with the city for disrespect.

"We know that our city officials are working hard to make sure that Hazelwood is a nice place to live," Caitlin Mills explained. "But even good city officials sometimes make mistakes. All we are asking is for the court to say it was a mistake for the city to tell us to shut down our cookie stand."

The implications of this case, however, reach far beyond Hazelwood’s city limits.

For more than a century American courts adhered to the principle that people could use their property almost any way they saw fit as long as they were not harming anyone else. Despite this general rule, courts allowed governments to use the "police power" to create laws carefully designed to protect the public health, safety, and welfare. Over time, however, courts shifted from the presumption that citizens should be able to make use of their property to a presumption that government should be able to restrict its use. The issue in this case is whether state and local governments still face any constitutional limitations on their ability to control the use of private property.

"Courts have already held that cities can control what citizens can build on their property, where they can build it… even what color they can paint it," said Roland. "If Hazelwood and other cities can prohibit kids from setting up a harmless, temporary cookie stand in their own front yard, it is hard to say that our constitutions still offer any significant protection for private property rights. The Freedom Center of Missouri hopes to remind the courts that vigorous protection of property rights is vital to the American constitutional system and way of life."

Founded in November 2010 and headquartered in St. Louis, the Freedom Center of Missouri is a non-profit, non-partisan organization dedicated to research, litigation, and education in defense of individual liberty and constitutionally limited government. Mills v. City of Hazelwood is the Freedom Center’s third case, and its first focusing primarily on the issue of property rights.

I don’t remember gettin’ a smallpox vaccination, I’ve just always had the dime size scar that I was told was where I got it.

‘Course there are lots a things I do remember as a young child, or at least I think I do. Some stories I relate to family members turn out ta have just faint resemblance to what they remember. I suppose we all remember things in a perspective of how we want to remember any particular incident. Sometimes it turns out I remember somethin’ happenin’ to me that actually happened to my brother, or at least that’s how he remembers it. Such discussions typically draw in my sister or mom or dad to get their input. We then usually agree on a scenario that becomes part of the collective memory. It may not be any more accurate, but at least no one can question the authenticity.

This is some fact, but mostly,

Just Jake Talkin’.

---

Weekly Column

To Your Good Health

By Paul G. Donohue, M.D.

Shingles Rash Gone, But Pain Lingers On

DEAR DR. DONOHUE: I’ve been trying to deal with shingles pain for six months. At times it’s so bad that I can’t sleep. I have tried Tylenol, Aleve and Advil, and some herbals that my wife bought. Nothing works. Can you tell me what will? How did I get it? Will the shingles vaccine take away the pain? -- R.M.

ANSWER: Shingles comes from the awakened chickenpox virus that has been hibernating in nerve cells ever since the childhood infection. Even if you can’t remember having had chickenpox, odds are you did. More than 90 percent of adults -- in fact, close to 99 percent -- have evidence of a prior chickenpox infection in their blood.

Once the shingles rash goes, pain continues to remain in a significant number of people. That’s not shingles. It’s called postherpetic neuralgia. When the chickenpox virus crept down nerves to your skin, it injured the nerves. That’s what causes lingering pain long after the shingles rash has disappeared.

Plenty of medicines can quiet that pain. You have to experiment to find which works for you. Lyrica is a somewhat newer addition to these medicines. You need a prescription for it. Capsaicin cream, gel or lotion is found on the shelves of all drugstores. You apply it directly to the painful skin. Qutenza is a new preparation of capsaicin. It’s applied by your doctor or a health professional in a one-hour treatment, and is touted to provide three months of pain relief.

The lidocaine patch is another skin-applied treatment that quiets pain. Amitriptyline and Cymbalta, both antidepressants, are oral medicines that can dull postherpetic pain. Opioids like tramadol and oxycodone can be turned to when others fail. And this is just an abbreviated inventory of treatments.