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Let’s face it: no one, and I mean NO ONE, likes to be told what to do with the land they own.

And most people never have to deal with that problem.

But there are some instances when projects encroach on land and people have to part with some of it.

In today’s story, a person described what happened when a landowner refused to play ball when they were asked to give up some of their property…

And it ended up costing them even more than originally planned.

Read on and learn about what went down.

I guess we will just have to take more then…

“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.

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 back slope of the proposed drainage ditches.

You gotta do what you gotta do with these kinds of projects.

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 with out R/W Acquisition 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 square feet of slope permissions.

The acquisition team 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.

It was time to play hardball.

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 feet 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.

They should’ve at least listened to what was going on here…

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.

A couple points:

Acquired R/W is paid 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.”

Reddit users spoke up.

This person weighed in.

Another Reddit user spoke up.

This individual shared their thoughts.

Another person chimed in.

If you enjoyed this story, check out this post about neighbors who couldn’t ignore reckless neighborhood driving after an accident occurred.

And this Reddit user spoke up.

This is a bummer for this landowner…

And no one can fault him for wanting to fight back against this.

Too bad it didn’t work out for him.

These kinds of land acquisitions are bound to cause some problems…