Baseball field = Gitmo

I'm having a bit of a hard time deciding which side of this story to come down on. On the one hand, you've got a guy who didn't follow procedure. On the other hand, you've got his neighbors, who seem to be a bunch of hyperbolic jerks. I'll let you decide:

Even a field of dreams needs a permit. Town officials in this posh San Francisco suburb [Danville] voted unanimously Tuesday to order David Lowe to tear down an 18,000-square-foot Little League practice field he built for his son.

The private equity investor spent hundreds of thousands of dollars building the field _ complete with Astroturf, a batting cage and motorized pitching machine _ on a prominent ridge. He said he did it because he couldn't attend his 11-year-old son's regular afternoon Little League practices, but still wanted to find a way to coach the team.

Now that's nice and all, but he didn't get the proper permits ahead of time, which is something he really should have thought of. Now, let's look at the other side...

Neighbors in the multimillion-dollar housing development below the ridge have compared the ball field to the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay because of its highly visible 14-foot fence.

Uh-huh. Don't you people think you're exaggerating just a little bit by comparing a baseball practice facility to a military prison? And what do you want to bet that a bunch of these people are liberals who picked that comparison explicitly to blow this out of proportion in the minds of likewise liberal local officials?

Anyway, he offered to lower the fence and landscape the hillside to hide the field from his neighbors' nhighly sensitive eyes, but no dice.