A former client of mine is suing the city
https://www.tri-cityherald.com/news/local/article235889252.html
So an admission first: I have to be careful about what I say here, as I said in the title the plaintiff is a former client of mine, and the defendant (city) is a current client. So any opinion you might read between the lines here is purely coincidental, as for the record I have no opinion to offer here.
Background first: as it says in the article, little old lady is interested in remodeling her house, city says she must improve the road frontage on her property as a part of her building permit.
Not in the article: the right of way in question is a former freeway offramp, that was conveyed from the state DOT to the city about 15 years ago when they made some major improvements to the freeway & interchange. The city has connected it to a nearby (newer) street, as a secondary access to some commercial property nearby (including my office) and as a secondary access to about 50 residential properties. Other than some minor new paving to connect to other streets, and some re-striping for 2 way traffic, it’s largely unchanged since the DOT repaved it in –I think– the late 80’s. She has frontage on this right of way but because it was limited access until a relatively recent time frame, she doesn’t use it to access her property.
What the article doesn’t tell you: when the city said she must improve her frontage, –someone somewhere– told her that she could dodge that requirement by subdividing the property so that the parcel containing the house no longer had frontage on that right of way. That’s when she called me. I told her from the start that the city would require the same improvements as a condition of approval for the short plat, but she wanted to soldier on based on the advice she got –somewhere–. Fortunately my dad did some right of way work for the city when they acquired the former offramp, and one of the other partners had done a boundary survey across the street from her, so I had something to base a short plat on without any field work. I totally cheesed together a short plat drawing based on the other stuff we had in the area plus aerial imagery, because I knew it was going nowhere. It wasn’t drawn on a napkin, but let’s just say it wasn’t my best work, but it was good enough for application and didn’t cost her an arm and a leg (I have no desire to rip anyone off). Unfortunately she still had to pay an application fee and get a title report, so she was out some cash but could have been worse. As expected, guess what the conditions of approval included: improve same right of way to city standards.
I heard nothing about it for the last year until I saw this article today. I hope she’s not still getting bad advice, other than that I’ll offer no opinion, but I’m curious to hear what my surveyor brethren think.
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