Since tackling the creek embankment that was used as an illegal dump site by people who don’t live along our road, Agent Smith and I started trying to mobilize residents to start talking about what sort repairs/work are needed to maintain and improve it. See, our road is private, meaning no government agencies maintain it. This includes cleaning up garbage dumped by outsiders; hence the big cleanup effort we organized a few years back. Things are really confusing if there is a crime or accident; if a crime occurs on someone’s property, the county sheriff will handle things, but for an accident or crime on the road itself, we deal with the CHP.
When we started rolling the “getting any serious repairs done to the road” boulder, I decided to research what it would take to remove a burned-out car sitting on the vacant and undeveloped property across from our southern border. Said car, according to other residents, has been sitting there for at least fifteen years, and you would think getting such an eyesore removed would be a pretty straightforward task.
Think again.
Turns out no one at the county, Sheriff’s department or CHP can assist us, as the car sits off the road on what is considered private property, and that would be considered theft.
Why not contact the property’s owners and ask their permission, you ask? There’s the sticky wicket. That property has been bought and sold twice since we moved here. Turns out there is a vicious cycle of someone buying the land, finding out they can’t easily build upon it because of a past landslide, defaulting on the loan they took out, and selling it themselves or through their bank. Twice now I determined who the current owner is/was, and twice I reached out to them thanks to some savvy web searches, and I have never gotten a response. Each time the property comes up for sale, I try contacting the listing agents and they too never get back to me.
At this point it looks like we’re stuck with the wreck for another 15 years, unless of course we have a good earthquake and it shifts five feet closer to the road. Then we could just make it go away into a dumpster…
