- Oct 9, 1999
- 4,999
- 106
- 106
Heres the situation My neighbor and i share a drain tile to the municipal storm drain system for draining our sumps. The drain tile is on my property. The tile collapsed and needed to be replaced I told my neighbor about the problem but they seemed to think it was my problem not theirs since their sump seemed to be pumping out the water just fine. I explained to them that what they were really doing was pumping the water to my house and then out the air relief on my sump tile at my house all over my houses foundation. their connection has no air relief so there was no where else for the water to go. I asked the old lady there to have one of her sons or daughters call me and i would explain the whole thing to them. I attempted to involve them in this for 3 weeks and not once did anyone respond to my calls or messages so i went ahead and got a contractor to replace the 4" weeper tile with schedule 40 pvc drain tile from my house to the municipal utility easement. the only thing not replaced was my neighbors tile to the new tile on my property but they are still connected to the new tile just as they were to the old one. Of the total run installed about 1/3 of the drain is before the point where me and my neighbor start sharing the tile so I figured they should split the remaining 2/3 cost with me. The cost of the entire job was $2600 so their responsibility would be $866 not wanting to be a jerk about it I just rounded that down to 800 and told them that was their share. The next day i get a call from her son whoe was the original owner of the house and he basically says that they are now going to get their own estimates on what the job should cost and they aren't going to be responsible for any more and since his house was here first that the tile is really all his and I was responsible cause my trees roots caused the damage. That last bit i know is b.s.. what it appears he did was have the contracters run the tile on my property when he built his home I suppose so he could plant trees in his yard without messing up the tile. then when my home was built the contractor just connected to it since it was on my property and connected to my stormdrain tap anyway. The problem is that no one told the original owner. As I see it from a legal standpoint the drain is mine since it is on my property and there is no existing easement for it. If they want to use it that is fine with me as long as they are willing to be responsible for half of the cost of the repair or maintenance of the shared portion of the line. I had the contractors use the best solution to replace the line as possible to avoid future problems with it. I figure if they want to give me some crap and not pay their fair share of the cost i just tell I am going to disconnect them from MY line(they connect to it on my property) and they can have their own installed on their own property. Does this seem reasonable? As it stands the cheat has gotten out of paying his share to repair it twice before because the previous owner didn't know he was connected to it. I only found out when the contractor did a video inspection of the tile to determine the problem and it's exact location.
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