UPDATE: The city backs down (see below) . . .
Quan and Angelina Ha are good eggs, they understand Southern California is in the clutches of a nasty drought and they want to leave the planet a better place for their newborn.
But the couple was dragged into Orange County Superior Court Wednesday to fight a lawsuit Orange, the city they reside in, has filed against them. Their heinous crime: ripping out their water-sucking front lawn.
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UPDATE: Orange's City Attorney's Office announced Wednesday it will drop the charges because the Has have come
into compliance with the city ordinance mandating that at least 40
percent of front lawns be landscaped.
Dave Wielenga wrote in the Weekly about killing his front lawn 10 years ago.
Clockwork's neighbors just did it.
It's a cool, groovy thing, man, been going on for years.
But Davey does not live in Orange, and neither does my neighbor. As the Los Angeles Times' Amina Khan reports, that makes a difference.
The city claimsed the Has were in violation of local law that requires residents to cover significant portions of their front lawns with live ground cover.
It's not like the Has left a dustbowl beyond their front door. Their former lawn was covered with wood chips. Unlike many of my tract's occupants with grass lawns, there are no weeds in front of the Ha place.
“We should be able to have our yards look the way we want them to,” Dennis Cleek, a neighbor who helped the Has un-install their lawn, told Khan.
The Has told Khan their water usage from from 299,221 gallons in 2007 to 58,348 gallons in 2009 after removing their lawn.
OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.