DiPietro v. Town of Bolton, Massachusetts
Alan DiPietro has been raising alpacas and selling their fleece since 2008 in Bolton, Massachusetts, a small, pleasant town in the state’s Nashoba Valley Region. By 2014, Alan’s alpacas needed more land, so he bought 34 acres that spanned Bolton and the adjacent Town of Stow. The property was undeveloped, so the 50-year-old former eng ...
Christina Martin is fighting for the forgotten
The first case Christina Martin ever argued in court wasn’t big enough to catch most public interest attorneys’ attention. It was about a ticket on a car. Christina was a young Pacific Legal Foundation attorney in her first real legal job. She’d moved cross-country from Oregon to Florida for “her dream job” at PLF. ...
The grandmother v. the theft
Geraldine Tyler, the 94-year-old Minneapolis woman at the center of next month’s argument before the Supreme Court in Tyler v. Hennepin County, only owed $2,300 in property taxes. That’s what started this whole thing. Ms. Tyler acquired a small condominium in 1999. After she moved in, crime in her neighborhood began increasing and bec ...
A Massachusetts alpaca farmer fights government theft
It’s not often you come across a person who leaves behind a well-respected corporate job in engineering to become an alpaca farmer in rural Massachusetts. But there is nothing typical about Alan DiPietro. It isn’t just his impressive beard or his love for alpacas that makes Alan unique. What sets Alan apart from the rest … ...
Struggling alpaca farmer fights government-sanctioned home equity theft
Bolton, Mass.; January 11, 2023: Yesterday, Alan DiPietro, an alpaca farmer in Bolton, Massachusetts, filed a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of a state law that allows local governments to take all the value of a home as payment for much smaller property tax debts. In 2014, Alan bought 34 acres of land that spanned Bolton … ...