Good Ponds Make Bad Neighbors?
- $40,000 in maintenance
- $90,000 in attorney fees
- 27 days in jail
That is what an Allen County land owner has put into the pond that is located primarily on his homestead in Allen County. Greg Tucker is a business owner, and thought he was buying an upscale property with a nice accessory, a large pond for his kids to play and fish in.
What he bought was a headache. See, the developer promised the next-door neighbor the right of access to the pond. However, no easement was ever created for the neighbor. Now the neighbor is an attorney, and you would think that an attorney would be held to be a sophisticated enough buyer to realize that permanent rights in the property of another cannot be created without a written easement, but the trial court said the now absent developer committed fraud and gave the attorney right of access to Tucker’s pond.
Then things got messy, as the attorney complained when Tucker made modifications to the pond site and messed with the water level. The trial court told Tucker to knock it off and when he was slow to act, sent Tucker to jail for contempt on 2 occassions:
The Hogans, who say developer Steve Jahn sold them legal access to the pond with their property, complained about the lower water level. And the fight was on.
Since then, the two couples have fought about a mound Tucker built across the pond so he wouldn’t have to hear the traffic on nearby I-69 or look at the Hogans’ house. When Heath ordered the mound removed last November, Tucker spent 18 days in jail in February for not removing the dirt fast enough. This month, Tucker was in jail for nine days after Heath ruled he hadn’t drained the pond enough to allow the Hogans to deepen the end near their home.
Outside of divorce, there is no better fight than a neighbor dispute. From a dollars and cents point of view, this type of dispute makes no sense, but I’d wager the parties will be at if for years to come.
Story from Fort Wayne News Sentinel, Kevin Leininger reporting.
October 8th, 2007 12:34
October 2007 update:
Appeals court ruled that the Hogans no longer have easement access to the Tucker pond. The Hogans hired a excavator to remove mound remnaments that the hogans claim were restricting the their access to the pond. By not showing the excavator the court orders the excavator started digging into the pond. Since the hogans manipulated the courts to have Tucker jailed until the 25′ deep pond was completely drained killing off the stocked pond. The excavator crossed the property line and removed over 147 triaxle loads of dirt out of the pond bottom on the tucker’s side of the property line and placed it on the hogans side of the property. The Tuckers have not completely lost faith in the court system yet and will see if the court can come up with some kind of remedy to make this come out right. As for the Hogans, all of the misleading and false information they have provided the courts will now be public knowledge.
July 8th, 2008 22:13
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