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The day my husband had been waiting for finally arrived. The top road engineer from the State (and two support staff for backup) were here. Outnumbered and surrounded, my husband was undeterred and ready to discuss the ditch from Hell in great detail.

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He explained how repeated snow plow drivers and mailman had driven on the edge and ruined the structural integrity.

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He explained how the sides have been caving in and filling the ditch with dirt, sand, gravel and chunks of road tar.

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He complained about the town scraping off all his hard won grass that helped the erosion.

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He told them he wanted to install .. at our expense…a perforated drainage pipe and fill in the ditch to bring a level lawn out to the road … like our neighbors on both sides and across the street.

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And that’s when things got tense. Because no matter how many reasons my husband gave, the head engineer would not be swayed.

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He kept repeating the ditch was necessary for proper road drainage. Which is odd, because it was the previous owner who (illegally) dug the ditch to begin with.

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Nothing my husband said… and believe me over the course of an hour he said a lot…. could sway the official.

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The end result?

Before the state paves the entire road, which will happen in the next few weeks, a crew will arrive to completely dig out and shore up the sides of our ditch. They will lay new dirt on the sides and scatter grass seed.

Big whoop.

To me this will be even worse than what we have now. It will be steeper… and harder to mow and weed whack than ever. Grass seed? Useless, it will just wash away into the ditch.

And before you say we should have just filled it in ourselves and not told them? The official told us if we did that we’d be given a huge fine and forced to dig it back out again… and if we didn’t? They’d come dig it out themselves and charge us for doing it.

They say you can’t fight city hall. Apparently you can’t fight the Maine DOT either.

😡