The challenge with bylaws

Bylaw wants me to alter my landscaping - at my expense.

A dear friend of mine, now departed, fought with a city over how he kept his property.  He fought them, tooth and nail, went to court, and regardless of his efforts and numerous petitions, lost.  Instead of capitulating, he continued to ignore their instructions.  They eventually came in and took over.  The battle continued after that and, after they pulled his business licence, he took his life.

The thing I learned from this is that you can't fight city hall.  You can discuss with them your concerns and points of view.  You can contact the various departments and personnel involved in the issue, but there is no sense being stubborn.  Ultimately, they have the law on their side, the power, and the inclination to proceed with their intent.  Right or wrong, agree or disagree, that's the way it is.

A person, unknown to me, complained that the rocks on a person's lawn were in the way of her opening her passenger-side car door.  She looked up the bylaws and found that the landscaping did not line up with city code.  She complained to the city.  However, it went further than that; she went up and down the street looking for anyone else that had a code violation and reported them all.  That included me.

The problem:  rocks on the city-owned boulevard had to be both 1" or smaller and had to be 1" below the level of the curb.  It seemed that my rocks were neither.  After numerous letters, phone calls, and face-to-face meetings, I have been told it all has to go.  All of it, every last pebble of my meticulously zero-scaped property, right up to where my property lines is.  Usually, that is a distance of about 3 or 4 feet, but being special means that I have to move it all some 15 feet.  It's just the way the lines were drawn.

In all my discussions with the numerous people I dealt with, I kept a polite demeanour.  Although I have not won, nor even managed to compromise, I have managed to get them to let me do the work in the spring rather than in the winter.  I have to move one smaller (but still large) rock, but the real challenge will be in moving the three-ton behemoth.  I cemented that puppy in the ground and now I will have to rent a crane to extract it and place it elsewhere.  That should be about a thousand dollars.  Then there is all the work I have to do in removing the 2" rock.  Afterwards, I will put soil down and grass the area.  Everybody will be happy, well, perhaps not me.  But, I will be done, the city will leave me alone, and I can wait happily until the next person decides that something doesn't belong.

You can't fight city hall, but you can talk with them.

Thanks for reading.

Eric Svendsen     www.ericspix.com