The Continuing Saga

My faithful readers will recall that many a post ago I discussed our "neighbor" Tony who owns the property below ours and his machinations to overstep his bounds--sneaking building materials onto his property, altering our access road (and our property downslope), etc. He rarely shows up on his property, but when he does bad things happen. We've tried contacting county agencies--they won't deal with him directly, but send someone to "look at" what he's doing and then send him a citation in the mail. It has very little force and so far has had no effect. We've been counseled that the only real way to get him to stop is through civil litigation, but to even begin the process costs thousands of dollars which we don't have, even pooling with our neighbors (thankfully the rest of us are all on the same side). It's been tense waiting for him to reappear and see what trouble he'll be up to next.

Today he appeared. And boy, was there trouble.

I was off grading--I got a frantic call from Joanna that Tony was tearing up the access road and cutting down trees. I rushed home to find that, indeed, he had a bulldozer and a backhoe pulling down the hill below our neighbor's house and word was he was planning the same below our house--he hadn't actually touched our properties yet, but what he was doing will certainly affect our properties when the hillside gives way. A handful of workers were helping him out.

So we sprang into action.

Joanna parked the Subaru at the very bottom of our driveway, and I parked the truck in the neighbors so that he couldn't bulldoze them out. We made phone calls to every agency we could think of. We shot still photos and videotaped both the landscape (for future comparisons, in case he wrecks something) and he and his workers doing the deed. My father and Joanna's mother came for moral support and advice (Tony and my father nearly got into it, but thankfully direct conflict was avoided).

And then the officials began to show up.

The sheriff's deputies were the first to arrive. Sadly, as we've discovered, every agency says, "What he's doing is bad, but we don't handle that kind of thing." So said the deputies, but at least they dressed him down for clearly not having permits or proof of legal right to do what he was doing. They did tell him he couldn't work on the access road any more today, so that much was stopped (though he continued to fell trees on his own property).

The fire officials came next. Again, they weren't the people who could help us (Tony is currently claiming that he's widening the access road and creating a turn-around with the permission of the fire department, which we suspect isn't true--mainly because the fire department wouldn't have the legal authority to allow him to do so). But the guys were friendly and did give us some advice about who we might contact.

Then the water and sewer guys showed up. Once again, they didn't do anything to end the construction, but they did show us where the sewer lines ran and made Tony answer quite a few questions.

Then the Department of Forestry man came. He didn't do much (he wasn't sure if the issue was in his jurisdiction), but like the others he did provide some useful advice.

The really useful part of the entire episode was that Tony saw that we weren't kidding and that he'll need to get his ducks in the row and get all the paperwork sorted out before he can just show up and start destruction measures. It was enough of a hassle for him to have to answer all the questions that hopefully he might decide to do things in a legal and straightforward manner from now on.

We've always been adamant that we have no problem with Tony doing work on his property of any kind--as long as it's legal and doesn't affect our property (despite his representing to the sheriff's deputies that we claimed we owned all his land...whatever). That doesn't seem too much to ask of a neighbor.