Imagine owning acres of land in the country. If a construction crew called you explaining that they need to buy part of your land to widen the road, would you be willing to listen, or would you yell at them and hang up?

In this story, one construction crew worked with pretty agreeable land owners, but there was one who wasn’t willing to listen. Keep reading to see how the story plays out.

I guess we will just have to take more then…

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.

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.

One land owner was not willing to talk to them.

There were approximately 80 properties which were effected during this process, and all but one set of propery owners were willing to work with out R/W Aquisition team.

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.

We 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 aquisition was sworn at pretty severely during this call.

He knows the government is the bad guy here.

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.

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.

It’s not like it was someone’s residence.

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.

It’s too bad the land owner didn’t at least talk to them. These guys are just doing their job, and it sounds like they were trying to help the land owners as much as possible.

Let’s see how Reddit responded to this story.

This person shares what they learned about eminent domain.

A surveyor weighs in.

This is a good point.

This person thinks the government was much worse than the land owner.

The land owner is probably furious.

If you liked that post, check out this story about a guy who was forced to sleep on the couch at his wife’s family’s house, so he went to a hotel instead.