Re: MUST GO ! City complaint


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Posted by D Sherman [72.47.9.228] on Wednesday, May 25, 2011 at 02:47:38 :

In Reply to: Re: MUST GO ! City complaint posted by Mark in NJ [63.143.145.217] on Wednesday, May 25, 2011 at 01:24:53 :

Part of the question, even if the law is on your side, is "How much time and money do I want to spend fighting this?" It's really easy to rack up a $5000 legal bill.

If the "authorities" have done their homework, they will reference chapter and verse in the municipal code, and you can look it up for yourself. If the law says "No unlicensed vehicles visible from the street" and you have unlicensed vehicles visible from the street, they've got you and you have to move them. I had one neighbor who got off the hook with a law like that by simply tying a blue tarp across the chain link fence gate that made the vehicle visible from the street.

If the laws says something really vague like, "No unsightly piles of junk", I've been told by lawyers that it's unenforceable in court. The law has to be more specific than that, although many junk ordinances aren't. And of course it might cost you real money to fight it in court.

If you got a nasty letter that doesn't cite chapter and verse, they may just be bluffing. It may even be that the complainer was so persistent that some harried bureaucrat said, "Okay, okay, I'll send the guy a letter.", while knowing that his department would never take it beyond that. Sometimes by making discrete inquiries you can get a clue about which is really more of a problem to the government -- your "junk" or your annoying neighbor complaining to them about it. If the latter, they may be happy to drop the issue if you just make some token change like moving it to the back yard or putting a tarp over it, so that they can tell the complainer that they did something. Good luck!



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