September 4th, 2008 · No Comments

By John DeFore

With the locavore ideal so much in the media these days and produce of vague origin sparking so many health scares, you’d think the last thing a city would go out of its way to do would be discourage local growers. Especially if those growers are adorable little girls.

But that’s just what happened when sisters Katie and Sabrina Lewis, aged 11 and 3, were told by the city of Clayton, CA (northeast of San Francisco) they had to shut down the stand where they’d sold their own produce for the last three years.

It all started when a neighbor (annoyed in part by a compost pile) complained about traffic stopping to buy melons and zucchini from the girls, who typically set up a card table every other Saturday and put the dollars they earned in college savings accounts. Officials decided to enforce zoning laws prohibiting such commerce in the area, despite the fact that America rarely punishes its budding capitalists for running lemonade stands, offering cheap snow-shoveling, or neglecting to file a 1040 on their paper-route income.

In the ensuing public debate, Mayor Gregg Manning took a law-and-order stance, telling the Mercury News “at the end of the day, it’s a zoning violation” while the girls’ father refused to accept that an exception wouldn’t be made for such a minor enterprise, especially one that supplied local families with fresh, fear-free veggies.

And now, after a bit of TV and blog coverage, the Lewis patriarch has had his way: The Planning Commissioner of this city of 10,000, admitting that the stand was “in keeping with the flavor or image of Clayton,” said the girls can go back to selling their wares. After a hearing in which numerous neighbors praised the girls for nurturing, harvesting, and selling their own little crop, the city (over the Mayor’s objections) agreed to revise its ordinance to de-criminalize them — and to make a special agreement with the Lewis household giving them explicit permission to continue until the wheels of legislative action set everything in stone.

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