Via Weekly Standard:
Americans have long had to fight City Hall, but now they have to fight an almost endless list of government bureaucracies at both the state and federal levels. Occasionally, however, the little guy still wins.
On the Central Coast of California, a private citizen named Steve LeBard — operating on behalf of various voluntary civil associations — has led an effort to build a privately funded memorial to America’s military veterans on a small plot of public land at the entrance to Old Town Orcutt. From the spring of 2011 onward, the California Department of Transportation (Caltrans) has maddeningly opposed him at every turn, balking at (among other things) the fact that the planned memorial was to include an American flag; that it was to include the words “United States”; and that it was to include the phrase “E Pluribus Unum.”
Now, Caltrans is waving the white flag. It turns out that, when faced with a steady barrage of negative publicity from the Santa Barbara News-Press, THE WEEKLY STANDARD, National Review Online, Fox News, and the Los Angeles Times, Caltrans can be quite reasonable. Of course, most private citizens don’t show the tenacious refusal to be bullied by senseless bureaucratic decrees that LeBard — who served in the Marines and is a Vietnam veteran — has shown, and the overwhelming majority of Caltrans’s affronts to private initiative and common sense are never publicly exposed.