@2drxploder & all
First, sorry for venting and gloating here. I’ll try to give short version, bullets
Dunwoody is a pretty upscale suburb of atlanta. Almost 100% very nice single family homes with a world class commercial district, mall, high rise office adjacent Atlanta’s beltway. Atlanta is pretty liberal city. Dunwoody and Georgia, not so much. We were part of unincorporated Dekalb County. Dunwoody pays a LOT of taxes (a LOT) & we couldn’t get any county Services.
After 40 years trying, we were able to form our own city (and keep our taxes), liberals went ballistic. We formed city for 3 reasons: (1) better police: Dekalb cops (all cops) are great, but they were chasing serious crimes on south side & we could never get one for 2-3 hours when our cars got stolen and our homes broken into. Formed a great Police Department, out of the park home run, zero crime.
2&3 were to stop the rapid development of zillions of apartments and millions of more square feet high rise office. Might be good for Atlanta, but was ruining our upscale neighborhood. There was also a little community college, with 1000 students, that was great for the community, but then they increased it to 14,000 students to keep the river of cash from the student loans growing. We formed the city to keep the college (and the college traffic) small, And to slow down or stop the high density development.
I was very involved. A lot of people say that, but I built the soapbox derby car that looked like the Dunwoody Police car and the mayor’s daughter was my driver. My kids are grown. I did it to help integrate the police department into the community a year after we formed the city.
what became instantly obvious was that a bunch of high-level rich beyond belief developers were behind forming the city, not to slow down the development, but to ENSURE it!
With all modesty, I have always been the community leader in my part of this area. I was active and vocal when we formed a city, and I was equally if not more so vocal and active when the corrupt leaders went in the opposite direction of why we formed a city.
when we spoke up at the constitutional public hearings on various projects, they did not listen to the public, they changed how the public hearings were conducted so nobody could speak in front of their neighbors. I lead a march on the capital and we had that reversed, but it had no effect on their plans. The city was formed in 2008, and what I’ve told you brings us up to about 2012.
Between 2012 and 2014 three big things happened. They decided that my road, a quiet two lane neighborhood street in a bedroom community where our kids go to school and we go to church with no commercial traffic, all of the sudden was a major thoroughfare, That had to be widened to four lanes with a turn lane in the middle. The only reason they would have to widen our road is because the high density and high-rise construction by the mall had constant zoning problems because there wasn’t enough ingress and egress. So they picked my road and one other road to turn into State Highways so a handful of people could get rich and the politicians could bump their chests on top of tall buildings.
You guys are probably figure it out I’m not so shy. I’m the ringleader fighting it all. You can never fight it in the courts because you’ll never have enough money. You have to fight it in the press, in the media, and on TV. You have to fight it from the church pulpit. And you have to fight it during elections, not by making it an issue, by targeting the rotten politicians and getting them voted out or defeated.
When the original plans came out to build “neighborhood scale intersection improvements” as an engineer who’s done the stuff for 50 years, I contacted all my neighbors and the media etc. and pointed out it’s highway construction, and I got it scaled back pretty good but not defeated. The next election we targeted a state Congress been a state senator and national Congressman, and we got them all defeated. After being involved with this for 20 years, that’s when they kind of noticed me.
in 2013, my house was it a transition point between phases of the project, and they took my house out of the project, but continued to work on the property as if it was part of the project, and more importantly, as if they had an easement to do so. Let me digress and say we had already defeated the five lane, now it was a two lane with bike lanes and sidewalks, so if an ambulance had to get through, it could.
They were chomping at the bit for me to sue them for the sole purpose of me getting a lawyer involved so they could run my legal bill out of sight without addressing any of the issues. It’s a politics 101 thing.
I not only got it in the local newspaper, it’s been all over Atlanta news for 6-7 years, and we’ve defeated four other very prominent very long-term politicians.
I mentioned three things a little while ago. The first thing was they moved ahead with the project, but the second and third thing were I went through a very bad divorce, and I stepped in a little hole in my front yard and absolutely destroyed my leg from my butt down to my toes: torn tendons, broken cartilage, torn muscles, devastation. I was on crutches for over a year, and I am still going through physical therapy today, seven years later.
from the divorce and from my injuries, I couldn’t keep up with my own stuff no less fighting the town, so the project marched on. In the middle, I tore the other knee, probably because I was walking on the first leg funny, and then from a forced sedentary lifestyle, I got a blood disorder like diabetes but not exactly. My career had been international before all this, so when I got injured and sick, I could no longer travel and my career came to a brick wall stop short.
as regards the local matter, I guess you could call that “pro,” because I was home most of the time. I have all kinds of video of them trespassing and destroying my property, etc.
I’m trying to keep this short, so let me say working without any easement and without any permission, during the construction on the road in the utilities, they did about $250,000 of damage to my property and my house. If you add in what an easement would cost at the minimum levels, but for the nine year duration, it’s also about $250,000. If you throw interest on top of that like you would put in an insurance claim, you go over $600,000. That doesn’t include the fact that I’m a handicapped senior!
And, now they’re moving on with the next phase of the project. The plans they had, which they have never served on me as required by law, and continuing to operate without any easement or permission, takes about a third of my front yard and creates a slope across the next third of my yard that I can get out easily with my F250 or maybe one of the Rangers, but my mark five would bottom out on the sidewalk.
They were smart enough not to start this phase of the work without getting the required easement, so they tried to negotiate with me, got all the way up to $30,000 and no home repairs, and they had to finally do a condemnation action which is a civil lawsuit.
Now I’m not a lawyer, but I have been doing all this exact work for 50 years from Little homes to the second tallest building in the world. I know the rules, I know The laws, I know the players, etc. As big and fancy as Dunwoody is, they have a gladhanding good old boy for a city attorney. I graduated an ivy league and I have worked with the mayors and governors etc. on all this stuff for years. So when this moron started chasing me, I just played his own game back at him, and frankly I have bitch slapped him around the city the county and the state for about five years now. Now, although I know all the bigwigs, I’m on the wrong side of the equation in this one, they are all lockstep with the developers who want this to happen.
The city attorney is such an idiot, he can’t even mail a letter to the correct address twice in a row. That is not an exaggeration. He has made so many mistakes in the law, that I’ve already had his thing thrown out twice, I got all my county judges to recuse themselves because they were in fear of the corruption, it went to another court, and I quickly proved that the judges were talking to each other so we got thrown out of that court.
Right now we’re in the third cord, I have a 1,400 page set of motions pending, most of which are regarding fraudulent documents and bad applications of the law. Things like “this must be done in 10 days” and we are two years later and now they want to proceed. Can’t do that, they have to start over.
I can go on for pages, but you get the idea. They have upped their offer three times in five months, and I am on the verge of having it shut down again, and it is also an election year. Our mayor, our congressmen and our senator and our national congressman and senator want to stay in office. One way or the other this is going to be over by the end of the summer.
Sorry, that is the VERY short version!!
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