A little story

Let me share with you a little story:

We own a two acre piece of property on a nearby island. It's a beautiful piece of property, with some large, old growth timber and a meadow. It's quiet and peaceful. When we bought it, as an investment, it had an old beat up house on it, and roughly 30 or 40 cars, boats and trailers in various states of rust and disrepair. There was a smallish semi-trailer full of garbage and bags and bags and bags of garbage piled everywhere. We spent thousands, actually tens of thousands, of dollars cleaning the property up, including tearing down the house. Neighbors stopped by and said "thank you! this looks so much better!".

Originally we had planned on repairing the house and reselling the house and property, but as time went by we realized it just wasn't cost-effective to repair the house and it would be better to tear it down. However, before we made that decision my hubby and I were at the property one day, measuring for windows. A strange truck pulled up in the driveway, loaded to the gills with bags of garbage.

"What are you doing?" my hubby asked the driver.
Dumping my garbage, he replied. The owner said I could.
"No", said my hubby, "I'm the owner and you CAN'T dump your garbage here!"
But I already paid Mr. X (the former owner) and he said I could!

At this point I wandered behind the house and looked in the back of the acreage and lo and behold, there was a pile of garbage already dumped that was 10-12' high.
The hubby was none-too-happy, to say the least. He copied down the gentleman's name, driver's license #, address and license plate number and promised him he would be calling the Sheriff's office. Which he did.
However, the Sheriff said the gentleman had already called him and explained the situation and promised he would be out promptly to clean up all of his garbage.
Days, then weeks passed, and no one showed up.
The hubby called the Sheriff again; they were too busy to deal with the problem, they said.
Fast forward six months.
Last month my hubby had to go to court. We are being fined by the county we live in for the garbage dump on our property. Garbage we did not dump. Garbage that was dumped by a total stranger on our property, which the Sheriff refused to do anything about. All of this after spending $50,000 to clean up the garbage that was on the property when we bought it.
Oh, it's not fair, the judge assured us. But regardless, we are responsible for keeping our property cleaned up.
So today, three of our employees, plus a local company we had to hire, who own a backhoe and a dump truck, went and cleaned up the property, again.

And people wonder why I hate living in this county.