In article
,
Joe wrote:

My neighbor has had a dead tree in the back of his property for about
a year, last night the wind finally broke the trunk and it fell a
little toward my yard but was stopped by a large oak tree on my
property. I'm worried that it might break apart and fall when my
children are playing in the yard. I need this tree to come down and
I'm worried that my neighbor won't do it. They have a habit of only
doing the kind of maintenance that is absolutely necessary. How do I
approach them to make sure they take care of this problem? I'm on
good terms with this neighbor and I'd like to take care of this in the
most tactful way possible but I get the feeling they are going to tell
me that if I want the tree down I'm going to have to pay for it
myself.

OK, I've been following this thread fairly closely. Here's my 25 cents
(2 cents worth of opinion plus 23 cents taxes)

I have a couple of rental houses in another city. A year ago, one of my
tenants called and said that a tree in the backyard had fallen, crashing
through the fence into the neighbor's yard. The neighbor claimed
ownership of the fence and wanted me to pay to have it fixed.

Not knowing **** about the "law," that sounded reasonable to me. My
tenant is a competent fellow as well as a reasonable one, and he agreed
to cut up the tree and haul it away, and rebuild the bad section of
fence (about 30 ft length of standard 6' dog eared 1 x 6 on 2 x 4 rails
with 4 x 4 posts.) He did this at an agreed upon reduced rate. (He's a
contractor.)

The total bill came to $850. I paid it and moved on with my life. Having
read this thread, I think now that I should have asked the neighbor to
at least split the cost with me.

But I wouldn't get into any kind of ****ing contest about something like
that. Being a good neighbor is a lot more important to me than being
right. Some advice columnist once said: "If you've got bad neighbors,
chances are, so do they."