MY BLOOD IS BOILING with bylaw

[Dewey Cox]

Take a pic from the woodpile pointing towards the car.
That’s the part everyone is assuming is bad.

[threeforthree]

Originally Posted by dicknormal

everybody's has a different standard for what's clean, neat or tidy. We all have that 1 neighbor that has higher standards and would like the rest to conform. We all probably have that one neighbor that has sub-par standards that are below the norm as well. Just figure out the common denominator and see where you figure in the equation. If I was a betting man.......

You would be a loser!

[HVA7mm]

It's an alleyway, who cares. It's not likely that there will be too many tour buses, parade routes or pub crawls. I'd much sooner have someone next door to me that is a good neighbor with a couple of vehicles/boats lined up in the alley that obviously trims/prunes their foliage, than some pretentious jerk next door with a new (leased) BMW in the driveway that can't even bother with upkeep in their back yard/alley. Disclaimer: I have no problem with BMW's

[HalfBreed]

Originally Posted by HVA7mm

It's an alleyway, who cares. It's not likely that there will be too many tour buses, parade routes or pub crawls. I'd much sooner have someone next door to me that is a good neighbor with a couple of vehicles/boats lined up in the alley that obviously trims/prunes their foliage, than some pretentious jerk next door with a new (leased) BMW in the driveway that can't even bother with upkeep in their back yard/alley. Disclaimer: I have no problem with BMW's

I'm guessing it would be something to do with property taxes and effected value. (That's right, not affected.)

I used to get hassled about my rear parked '84 wasserboxer parked beside my 17' '81 speedboat.


I hope it wasn't my neighbors at the time, one was an older widow whom I cut the lawn and kept front and rear clear.
The other was what would be seen as a new Canadian (is that racist of me or reverse racist?) however they were more Canadian than me. I just cleared the rear alley side as well as the front boulevard and fence side, inside their fence was terrible, but a soldier knows his bounds. (edited to add neighbors)

[260 Rem]

Originally Posted by HVA7mm

It's an alleyway, who cares. It's not likely that there will be too many tour buses, parade routes or pub crawls. I'd much sooner have someone next door to me that is a good neighbor with a couple of vehicles/boats lined up in the alley that obviously trims/prunes their foliage, than some pretentious jerk next door with a new (leased) BMW in the driveway that can't even bother with upkeep in their back yard/alley. Disclaimer: I have no problem with BMW's

Which would you prefer when you are selling your house?

[HVA7mm]

Originally Posted by 260 Rem

Which would you prefer when you are selling your house?

It really doesn't make any difference to me. If it is in a desirable neighborhood and someone wants to buy it, they will buy it. If not someone else will. In the end it won't really matter as the property will sell. I guess that there is a difference between people that want to sell their home, and people that need to sell their home.

[Badgerbadger]

Have you told them that you pay their salary yet?

I think you should. It will probably help them realize that you deserve their respect.

[KegRiver]

Sorry to hear that many have issues with heavy handed local governments.

I got one of those letters a week ago and I don't live in or near any city. Even county governments can be hard to deal with.

In my case, I do have an unsightly property. I can't argue that. Where I have an issue with the order I received is there is a reason my property is run down.

I'll make this as brief as possible. About twenty years ago the local county installed what they consider to be a workable sewer system in the Hamlet I lived in at that time. Only problem is it didn't work for me or anyone in the community that I talked to.

The system is what they call a low pressure system which means that the county simply hooked everyone up to a 1 1/2" Poly pipe that runs to a sewage lagoon. We all still had to have tanks and pumps.

Apparently it is an approved system for small numbers of homes. Why it won't work for us I don't know, all I know is that several times a year it burst pipes in our tanks, blows couplings apart and even ruptures the lines the county has leading to our homes.

The end result is that my home would get flooded with sewage several times a year. The only way to stop the flow was to have the county shut off their line. In a month or two the county would turn the valve back on, without notifying me that they intended to do so. I would learn about it when I would smell sewer and then discover my basement flooded with sewage and sewage running across my lawn and into the creek behind my home.

In the end I gave up and bought another place in another district. Then I put the problem property up for sale. I soon discovered that it had lost almost all of it's value. No one wanted to inherit the sewage issues.
Through all this the county maintained that the problem was my setup not their system.
It was only later that I learned that almost everyone had the same issues.

So by the time I found out that I was not the only one with issues, it was too late. I can't afford to fight a long expensive court battle and I can't afford to maintain a property I can't use for anything other then storage.

So I've let the property get run down. All it is good for now is storage but now the county is looking to take that from me too.

I'm a senior on a pension. I can't afford lawyers or expensive cleanup campaigns.

There is one bit of light at the end of this tunnel. I talked to a retired CAO with many years of experience as a county administrator.
He told me that they can't touch this property that I live on now to pay for cleanup at the other property. So I can abandon the property and it then becomes their problem in every sense of the word.

It doesn't feel right that I should loose my investment because of what they did, but unfortunately that is the reality we live with.

One other consolation, at least none of you are in danger of loosing your investment. Yet.

[58thecat]

Bylaws are bylaws and without them one residence will look neat, orderly etc and then there's that neighbour.....peoplekind....

[260 Rem]

Originally Posted by Badgerbadger

Have you told them that you pay their salary yet?
I think you should. It will probably help them realize that you deserve their respect

Might want to hold off on that in case you run into someone like me ... who pulled out a quarter and asked if they could make change for the portion of their tax money that went toward my salary

[260 Rem]

Originally Posted by 58thecat

Bylaws are bylaws and without them one residence will look neat, orderly etc and then there's that neighbour.....peoplekind....

I would have no problem telling a messy neighbor if their “junk” was affecting my property value...and if the mess included a parking lot in their front or back yard which was non-compliant with bylaws ... I would seek resolution through the municipal authority.

[threeforthree]

And that’s is why I wait for bylaw officers not summer students to tell me I don’t like the colour of your boat....all my neighbors have no problem as we meet in alley often.

[Sooner]

Originally Posted by threeforthree

And that’s is why I wait for bylaw officers not summer students to tell me I don’t like the colour of your boat....all my neighbors have no problem as we meet in alley often.

Best thing, wait to talk to the guy who makes the decisions. Worked for me many years back.

[260 Rem]

Originally Posted by threeforthree

And that’s is why I wait for bylaw officers not summer students to tell me I don’t like the colour of your boat....all my neighbors have no problem as we meet in alley often.

If a neighbor did have a problem, would you endeavor a remedy?

[threeforthree]

Originally Posted by 260 Rem

If a neighbor did have a problem, would you endeavor a remedy?

For sure...not even a issue. The reason there is not a weed in our back alleys because I take of eight of them. Now to the west? No do not look after them.to me unsightly is looking at all the weeds and lots are noxious.

[thumper]

Switch your signs over to Arabic. No gov't employee would dare charge you with any infraction.

[AB2506]

Originally Posted by threeforthree

And that’s is why I wait for bylaw officers not summer students to tell me I don’t like the colour of your boat....all my neighbors have no problem as we meet in alley often.

I've worked nearly 28 years as a Special Constable or now days as Peace Officers, enforcing various municipal bylaws. If you expect neighbors you meet in the lane to fess up that they dropped the dime on you, you are naive.

We are supposed to do proactive work like patrol parks and pathways, write up the really bad unsightly properties, but we are inundated with more calls each year. We must be doing a great job, because the calls are getting more chintzy all the time. Expectations are getting higher.

For example, someone called in a weed file. There was one dandelion on the front yard. It was hard to keep a civil tongue talking to the complainant, who was not happy I was not taking action on one dandelion.

To get summer students, you have to have a project that the provincial or federal government will fund. Generally, cities will not pay for them out of their own pocket. Judging by your property and the lane, some alderman wants the students to write up all of the "problems" in his ward. Do you know if any neighbors were written up for tall grass/weeds/tree branches/pallets in the lane? You have to remember the students usually have no legal standing, they are just creating files and notifying the offending property owners. If no compliance is obtained, then an officer would write a remedial order (private property) or a wrtten warning ( city property) or sometimes both. Fail to comply with those documents, and you most likely be billed for the cleanup costs ( don't pay the bill and it will go on your taxes) and/or ticketed for the alleged offence or for non-compliance with the order. The students likely have little or no training except riding with an officer for a few days. Being young and inexperienced, their judgement needs some fine tuning. We all went through that stage in our lives at some time.

Calgary has a Community Standard Bylaw. Theoretically, a property should be judged in relation to the "community standard" of the community the property is in, not some high faluting up scale community. Your community looks a lot like Willow Park or Lake Bonavista, an above average community, but not ritzy. If it were me, I would drive right through that lane, but on special projects, we are sometimes tasked with writing up every violation, no matter how small. It's all pensionable time is the way I look at it.

So, I would park the vehicles and trailers as neatly as I can, keeping the cars fully out of the lane. I would also put the firewood in a neat stack out of sight. I can't see between or behind the vehicles, but it looks good.

So just relax, it isn't the end of the world, you aren't banned from international travel.

[^v^Tinda wolf^v^]

The only thing I would clean up is the wood pile.
I went through a similar thing only I went in and told them what my plans were and they said no you can’t do that so I proposed a different idea and once again they said no. I went ahead and did it anyways and haven’t heard any complaints as of yet and it’s been over a year. They know me well and although I make my way across their district as I please while breaking bylaws left and right I also do a lot of good in the process. The community knows I’m harmless and I do believe they feel a little safer when I am around becuase things are getting out of hand. I clean up other people’s garbage and blast people who are the real reason why things are getting so bad and in turn make it difficult for people like me to just go roam freely. Is what it is.

[Peter Abelard]

The bylaw is reasonable.

But it's always been neigbor-complaint-driven.

Paying kids to play rat is gaming the system.

DO. NOT. LIKE.