Early Christmas Present.

A citizen wanted me to enforce access to an easement which he swore that he had, which people parked in front of. Although his otherwise landlocked property plat has another easement to another street, he told me that he thought that his deed gave him a new easement to drive his cars out to this street. He wanted me to make these people quick parking where they had thought that they were doing so legally.

Hm.

I researched the issue. I looked up CAD drawings of the plats, and saw the other easement, plain as day. I didn't see the one the citizen wanted me to enforce.

I went to the City Zoning Clerk.

Pretty much my only dealings with this woman have been in her capacity as a municipal court clerk. And frankly, she's been having to train herself to do that, and the learning curve has been steep, causing both of us to be a tad frustrated, at times.

But now I got to see her in her element. Not only did she have some training as a zoning clerk, but she was interested in it. She briskly took me to a very large cabinet full of site drawings and blueprints, standing in a room full of them. She went right to the subdivision after consulting a rather ingenious index that correlated to a city map on the wall-- her own invention. She pulled out B&W CAD drawings, and blue print CAD plots in both blue-and-white and white-and-blue, and then pulled out original graphite-and-vellum pencil-drawn originals. She had a semi-grin on her face, as she pointed to three generations of maps that proved that n0 such easement had been registered. Actually, four generations, when you included the online view of the county appraisal office.

I knew that grin. It had nothing to do with whether the man's easement was a figment of his imagination, or not. It had to do with the fact that she had solid, irrefutable proof that no civil engineer or surveyor or whatnot had registered such an artifact with her office or the county in 70 years.

"You love this stuff, don't you?" I asked.

"Yeah, I really do. I love maps," she grinned.

"I'm kind of a cartographile, myself," I said.

I asked her what the city code was on driveways, and she rattled off from memory the prima facie dimensions for driveways and the minimum distance that they had to be from property lines.

She zapped me a quick couple of copies for my citizen to see, and we came up with the contact info for registering such items on the deed with the county and herself. The citizen was going to have to use his other easement, until such time as his other one was recognized.

As I started to leave, I said, "Hey, lady, you're pretty good at this."

She responded, "Thanks..." and looked up from the maps that she was re-filing, and smiled. She just picked up on what she had gotten from me: My genuine respect for her ability.

I don't know what it means to her. I just know that it means something to me.