It's our fault, but your problem

Stuff like this makes it painfully obvious that local government bureaucrats all too often have the same child-like inability to accept responsibility for anything they do that they had when they were five years old.

When 60-year-old Cynthia Roberson got a citation to for having snow on her sidewalk, she could not believe it.

And it's not because the disabled woman can't physically move the frozen-over mess, but because she already paid someone to shovel her walkways.

"It was clean. It was done correctly," Roberson said.

However, she said overnight Denver city plows scooped the snow back and buried her sidewalks. Now, the city has given her 24 hours to remove the snow or else she faces a fine of $150 for the first offense, $500 for the next one.

One heck of a scenario right there. The woman complies with the law, the government comes along and totally, unapologetically wrecks her efforts that put her in compliance with the law, then warns her to get back to work and get back in compliance. If that does not put the lie to the "public servant" title and reveal the "public master" mentality, then I don't know what would in a case like this. They did offer to throw her a bone by giving her more time to be in compliance again and to call the city government for help from a volunteer snow plowing team.

The only way to fix this is to put a sort of failsafe into the state legal system. I think we need a "failure to do right" statute that shifts the entire burden onto the individual government employees who created the situation, and that makes it illegal to enforce any laws against the private citizen that are violated due to the employees' screw up.