Forest Park City Georgia residents have been spared the horror of buying fruits, vegetables and herbs grown by the Little Ones Learning Center.
The preschool grows the produce on its own land and teaches their charges about how the plants grow and how careful tending reaps results.
Until recently, the produce was sold at a bi-monthly stand outside the school. Some of the food was sold below cost to local food stamp recipients.
This mortal danger to Georgia’s citizens has been squashed by the strong hand of bureaucracy.
“Anywhere you live, you’ve got to have rules and regulations,” Forest Park City Manager Angela Redding said. “Otherwise, you would just have whatever,” the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported.
Redding fears that if the tots are allowed to continue their outlaw produce stand “we could end up with one on every corner.”
The city bureaucrat was not totally without heart:
The city has offered Little Ones an opportunity to hold their farm stand in another part of town, but it is far away from the preschool and its neighborhood. City officials also said that Little Ones could pay $50 for a “special event” permit for each day it hosts its farm stand—a fee that is prohibitively expensive for the school and its small produce stand. For now, the school is selling its fruits and vegetables inside the building, but the indoor location is leading to far fewer sales as passersby don’t realize it’s there.
This appears to be little more than a pay-to-play situation for the tiny school. And another example of how petty bureaucrats make life more difficult for everyone.
You can see exactly how the Little Ones program works in this video: