Farmers should not be threatened with 90 days in jail and $1,000 in fines for selling pumpkins or Christmas trees grown outside city limits.

 

Yet that is the law in Lake Elmo, Minn.  On December 1, 2009, the Lake Elmo City Council declared that it would begin enforcing a law that forbids farmers from selling products from their own land unless they were grown inside city limits.  The city’s politicians argue that they are protecting Lake Elmo’s rural character.  In fact, they are destroying that character by making it impossible for their farmers to earn an honest living and making it more likely that family farms will fail.

 

Lake Elmo’s law harms farmers like Richard and Eileen Bergmann and their three grown children who run their farm while restricting choices for their costumers.  The Bergmanns have farmed in Lake Elmo for nearly 40 years and regularly need to add to their inventories with produce grown outside the city, including from a pumpkin farm they operate just a few miles away in Wisconsin.  But Lake Elmo bans the Bergmanns and other farms in the city from bringing in and selling farm goods from out of the city and out of the state.  Engaging in free trade with farmers from across the country allows the Bergmanns and small farmers like them to survive.  Lake Elmo’s ban negatively impacts farmers well beyond Lake Elmo’s borders.

 

Unfortunately, Lake Elmo is not alone:  cities and states across the nation are stripping away the basic right to trade freely between states and even within a state. Such misguided laws are more than bad business; they are unconstitutional.

 

That is why on May 18, 2010, the Institute for Justice—a national public interest law firm with a history of successfully defending economic liberty and the rights of entrepreneurs—filed a federal lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the District of Minnesota on behalf of the Bergmanns and their farming partners, challenging Lake Elmo’s trade ban as a violation of fundamental constitutional rights.