This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Thursday, May 14th, 2009. I'm Caleb Brown.

Your property or your rights. For one California family, it may be a very real choice.

Either give up the right to vote on local improvements or be denied a permit to make

additions to your own home. That according to Tim Sandifera senior staff attorney at the Pacific Legal Foundation,

the Cato Institute adjunct scholar and author of the Cato Book Cornerstone of Liberty,

property rights in the 21st Century America.

The case of Griswold v. Carl's Bad was heard by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals,

May 7th.

Who are Craig and Robin Griswold?

Well, they're property owners who own a home in a town near San Diego, California

called Carl's Bad, California, and they wanted a few years ago to add a couple new rooms to their house because their

house is very small and they have grandkids now and they wanted them to be able to stay over.

So they applied for a building permit to add some new rooms to their home and when they did, the city of Carl's bed came to them and said basically, you have to give up your right to vote in exchange for a building permit.

California law allows property owners the right to vote on the assessment of their property

for local improvements like street lighting and sidewalks and things like that.

The California Constitution says that before a city can require you to pay these assessments,

it has to put it up for a vote.

But what the city here decided to do was to just get around that by saying to the

Griswold that they had to either pay this amount up front or sign a waiver that basically gives up their right to vote no on these kinds of

assessments. And what's sad about this is typical of the kind of forced extractions of rights that cities are doing to individual property

owners throughout the country in exchange for building permits. They're

leveraging their power to grant permits in order to extort money or other rights from private property

...