Going off on off-grid

Saw this ...
http://csglobe.com/florida-makes-grid-living-illegal/
... posted on Facebook and responded thusly:

I read some of the local news reports back when this story first broke.  Much of the issue came down to her property being hooked up to the municipal sewer but not having an active municipal water account hooked up. The sewer system there gets financed via a portion of the municipal water fees. Kinda' like gasoline taxes that go towards highway expenses. She has said she no longer uses the municipal sewer connection, but gave the impression that—at the time of the initial complaint—she had been (presumably by filing the toilet tank manually) .

An elegant solution might have been to come up with an ad hoc sewer line fee and move on, rather than escalating, but gov't bureaucracies generally are unable to muster up such flexibility. Easier to interpret and respond as 'defiance' as there are known familiar protocols in place for such. Responding to special needs/context would call for a level of creativity that was clearly lacking. And unfortunately, allowing officials creative flexibility in enforcing stuff has slippery-slope double-edged-sword implications to consider.

Anyway, while the OP csglobe.com article pushes in the direction of my personal bias—having subsistence living completely off grid within a property allowed*—I still feel compelled to point out that their piece comes off to me as blatant highly spun PR trash. I endorse their goal, but condemn the way they've chosen to go about it. I find the woman's situation plenty interesting without having to turn it into a completely polarized PR caricature. I encourage folks to consider how they would react if they came across a piece written in the same style but about something they opposed or were even just neutral about.

*[Something I like to give thought to at times when musing about off-grid living is that there's a 'money grid' in addition to the typical power, food, and water and such to be considered. Namely relating to the idea of 'alloidal title' as property taxes (like utilities with no opt-out option) require one—by law—to interact with Federal Reserve credits (i.e. money, $$$s). There's an element of bondage in being prohibited from setting up a completely neutral-impact balanced subsistence existence on a property—perhaps with a few friends—and then never touching currency again. I could see some level of direct service requirement perhaps, but as is one must interact with mercantile middlemen in some way to generate Federal Reserve tokens and then take what's left after various parties have skimmed their bits in order to pay gov't rents and fees. At the very least, allow folks to negotiate a fixed rate when purchasing a property so that folks on fixed incomes don't get pushed out just because some absentee developer builds a subdivision or shopping complex across the road hence giving tax vultures an excuse to reappraise the hypothetical/future resale value of one's property to raise one's real/current taxes.Oi!]

</end rant>