Loved the comments. Joe the Plumber's was especially good. Everyone seems pretty good- natured about the whole issue, though. That's good.
Don
Edit: Are you "Land Surveyor"?
This is the sort of story that needs to get national attention. Homeowners everywhere need to get wakeup calls like this on a somewhat routine basis.
We had a rich fellow fighting with the officials of a local town a number of years back. He hired a survey company to go around town and survey the streetside property lines of 30 or more places where improvements had been made in the public right-of-way and ignored by the city. He was doing something in the r-o-w himself so figured he could get away with it because so many others had already done so. In the end, the city allowed him to do what he started to do, but, with a big caveat that they could wipe it out anytime they needed to do so to benefit the public. The rich guy is now dead and every member of the city commission and the principal city bureaucrats are no longer involved in city business. Meanwhile, the improvements still exist in the r-o-w.
When I lived in Denver, on an inexpensive property (I owned), I got a notice in the mail that I better remove a dead tree on my property, near my house, or they would remove it and charge me. It was not a small tree (Maybe three-feet in diameter?)
The tree looked like it was on my property because of where a fence of convenience ran. The fact is the tree was on the property line. I was highly tempted to ask the person who wrote the ticket how they decided where the property line was and how they decided they knew the tree was mine. (I guess we could have showed each other our land surveyor's licenses.
But I wimped out. In this case, the neighbors were relatively poor, and the only improvement the tree would have harmed if it fell, was my own house. I paid someone to come take the tree out in the end. Still it kind of irritates me that the City employee decided s/he was qualified to decide whose property the tree was on.
You gotta wonder about the article and if the City (Castle Rock was it?) knew where the property lines were......
Tom