--However, if what I understand to be the case really is the case, damn if someone wouldn't pay for encroaching on my property. Maybe it was wrong to shoot the messenger for the message, but to paraphrase John Wayne in "The Green Berets", sometimes due process is a bullet.--
Sane people know the difference between war and civil procedings. That point seems to be lost on you.
Don't get personal, now. That point isn't lost at all, and shame on you for assuming I don't understand it. I was making a point, that the city had not given the property owner due process. Civil proceedings cut both ways...the responsibility of the property owner is to grant access if an easement legally exists. The responsibility of the government is to ensure due process, or allow the property owner to challenge a proposed new easement in court. Again, from what I gathered from the article, the existing easement didn't cut across the man's property, and the city decided on the spur of the moment to create a new easement across the private property, giving the property owner's wife notice that the next day they would be digging a new sewer line.
Where is the civil responsibility on the part of the city? Where was the public hearing? Where was the man's opportunity to challenge the easement in court? By civil proceeding do you mean it's a property owner's responsibility to allow the government to run roughshod over his right to own property, and allow him to address it only afterward? Sorry...that's not how its supposed to work in this nation.
Please answer without slinging personal insults. It's Sunday, and I'd rather not get into a nasty name-calling battle here.
Scouts Out! Cavalry Ho!