If you own your land, nobody can forcefully take it from you, right? Wrong.

Insert the government.

Yes, the government can and will force you to sell your land if they need it for their purposes. That’s what happens in today’s story, and it did not turn out the way the land owners had hoped.

Let’s see how the story plays out…

I guess we will just have to take more then…

To start off, I understand this situation is bad for the landowners, but their unwillingness to work with us made everything worse for them.

Last fall, my team was designing a roadway widening on a secondary evacuation route in prime hurricane territory.

As we were doubling the number of lanes, we had to claim additional right of way (R/W)from the property owners on the route.

Out of 80 properties, one owner was not okay with the proposal.

In order to minimize the amount of land we had to claim, we only proposed taking the minimum amount of R/W possible, which was to the top of the backslope of the proposed drainage ditches.

This was not sufficient to cover all work being done, so we had to request “slope permissions” and “erosion control permissions” from the land owners, saying that they would retain the land, however we would be allowed to impact the land during construction.

There were approximately 80 properties which were effected during this process, and all but one set of property owners were willing to work without R/W Acquisition team.

The owners ended up losing a lot of their land.

The last owners were losing approximately 1 acre of land along their 3,000 foot property bordering the road, and we were going to include about 5,000 sf of slope permissions.

When aquisition reached out to them, they were told in no uncertain terms, never contact the property owners again.

Legally, we had to reach out again, and acquisition was sworn at pretty severely during this call.

As they were unwilling to work with us, we only had one option, move for condemnation, and considering they made it clear that they would be unwilling to work with us in the future if need arose during construction, we had to take 20′ of additional R/W for the entire length of their project, more than doubling the amount of profit they lost.

Here’s some more important info about the story…

So, their refusal to work with us ended up costing them much more land than they wished.

I get it, it is bad that the government is going to come in and compel you to sell your land, but we were trying to reduce the impact to your property as much as possible.

Couple points:

Aquired R/W is payed out at assessed market price, regardless of whether there is an agreement of if the legal process of condemnation must be taken.

This happened in a rural area, and none of the parcels were residential. The one in question is nearly 300 acres and, like many of the properties in the area, is primarily used as a private hunting area.

At least it wasn’t a residential area, but that’s still too bad for the land owners.

Let’s see how Reddit reacted to this story…

Here’s a lesson on eminent domain…

A surveyor weighs in…

This is a good point.

This reader shares an even worse deal.

This reader couldn’t do OP’s job.

Sometimes working with the government is the only option.

Thought that was satisfying? Check out what this employee did when their manager refused to pay for their time while they were traveling for business.