Image courtesy Pacific Legal Foundation
A federal judge has suspended enforcement of a city’s fines against the owners of a home painted with Van Gogh’s “Starry Night” theme, ruling that such punishment would cause “immediate and irreparable injury” to the owners.
As WND reported, officials in Mount Dora, Florida, a town known for its Modernism Museum and Mount Dora Center for the Arts, were taken to court by the owners of the home.
The city already had assessed fines of $8,600, and they were going up by $100 a day.
The dispute began when a local artist approached Nancy Nemhauser and Lubek Jastrzebski about painting a wall that surrounds their house, which had been adorned with cracked and peeling paint.
They called the city’s Planning & Zoning Department and were told that there is no code for aesthetics on house paint, so no permit was required.
They then contracted with the
