Farmer unhappy with surveyor (5/26/05)

To the editor:

Does the Jay County Surveyor’s office have the right or approval to trash taxpayer’s property, rendering it useless while maintaining county ditches?

In the spring of 2004, they cleaned a ditch that borders a place we farm. For many years there was a trailer court on the other side of this ditch and somehow this ditch was filled with every kind of trash you can think of.

Now maybe I should not mention trailer court and trash in the same sentence, but surely most people would concede we didn’t throw any trailer anchors in from our side.

The ditch crew dipped all this trash out and spread it from 75 to 90 feet across our farm. When we tried to farm it, we received a clogged tillage tool and a flat tire for our effort. The landowner was promised it would be cleaned up, but the 2004 planting season came and went and the mess was still there.

This past March, when the ground was way too wet, a feeble attempt was made to clean it. The trash they did remove was left in a woods at the end of the field. The bulldozer did succeed in making it unfit to farm again this year, plus a path the entire width of the field on his way to the area. What appeared to be pickup tracks ran the full length of the area, cutting ankle-deep ruts in the ground we did farm last year. Guess he didn’t want to risk his tires in the trash zone.

Last Saturday I found a one-foot piece of board with a spike nail in it. Do you think they have the funds to pay for tire damage if I try to farm this ground? Dream on.

It shouldn’t take much common sense to know this material should have been loaded straight on a dump truck from the ditch. At the same time they performed this last great clean-up, they dipped a ditch at another location on this farm. This time they left dirt mounded to hold water back from running into the ditch. More of our tax dollars at work.

We have a county tile that runs through a farm we own that hasn’t been right for at least 15 years. I called Mr. (county surveyor Brad) Daniels’ office in October and again in February about this. He is either too busy or important to return my calls. I don’t know Mr. Daniels from Adam’s overcoat, but I’ll bet if we owned eight or 10 farms and had Dr. in front of our name we would have heard from him by now.

Some time ago I read where they were debating if it would be more cost-effective to hire a private contractor than for the county to maintain its own equipment. Perhaps they should have also considered the quality of work you would receive.

I think the legal implications alone would keep a private contractor from doing some things I have described here. This brings us back to my original question. If there is an attorney that can hear the cash register ring from any part of this story, he can have it all.

For me, it would be like when Rooster Cogburn shot the nitro: Good to see them floating in the water when the smoke clears.

Sincerely,

Terry Snyder

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