Living in No Man's Land
(Published in The Providence Journal on Dec. 28, 2005)
FALL RIVER, Mass. - James Almeida lives in Fall River, but some haven't accepted that. Actually, what they can't accept is the road he lives on. Or they accept that his road exists -- somewhere -- but they can't quite find it.
A Yahoo! search won't locate his address. MapQuest? A fruitless quest.
The Fall River tax assessor found him. Almeida paid taxes on his house at 124 Line Rd., further proof, perhaps, that taxes are one of life's two guarantees.
And the Fall River Board of Elections allowed him to register to vote. After all, he lives in the Bay State.
But when he went to get a driver's license the Massachusetts Registry of Motor Vehicles said no. The Registry officials told him they didn't recognize a Line Road.
(The Rhode Island Department of Motor Vehicles apparently said yes to his postal address, which is 124 Cory's Lane in Tiverton, he says. He flashes what appears to be an Ocean State license during an interview at his house.)
And when he got his phone number, it began, of course, with 401, Rhode Island all the way.
But when he's needed emergency services, he says, he dials the Fire Department business number -- the Fall River one. And when his house caught fire, the Fire Department found him -- sort of. More on that later.
When he parks his car, he leaves it in Rhode Island. Because of a neighbor, whom he says sometimes puts up a chain blocking off the road. Almeida's car sits about 150 feet away. He points through a window to a Volkswagen Beetle at the end of Bridle Way in Tiverton. He worries about snowstorms. What if there's a parking ban?
It's safe to say Almeida has pretty much had it with all this.
"I pay my taxes," he says, "I want to be found."
His house sits in a no man's-land. His situation is one that you'd think couldn't exist in the era of Google satellite maps that can seemingly find anything and zoom in.
But Line Road is a so-called "unaccepted road," one that has not been recognized by Fall River but exists to the naked eye. Such roads are not uncommon. Muddling matters more, Almeida's house borders Tiverton and so he straddles two states, which, combined, appear to be meeting his needs most of the time.
Depending on one's point of view, the issue is either an undeserved hassle for a dedicated taxpayer or an example of let-the-buyer-beware.
Almeida pointed his frustration in a recent interview toward city and state officials, asserting that they could take care of the road situation and should have in the 1990s, before he bought the house.
He has filed a petition, as people can who live on unaccepted roads, asking the city to accept the road. He says that when he checked in several months later, he was told City Hall did not have the petition. Frustrated, he tried again. After being sent in several directions, with an aide to the mayor trying to help him, Almeida filed the petition.
"I'm just asking to be mapped on a map," Almeida says. "We're all supposed to be paying taxes for services."
The Fall River City Council will hear the petition and can refer it to the Planning Board, as is policy. The Planning Department will in all likelihood need to take a look at the road, and then the board will make a recommendation to the council, according to Jim Hartnett, Fall River's top planning official. That is an advisory opinion; the council can decide what it wants to do.
But getting a road accepted can prove difficult, even rare. It is not unusual for unaccepted roads to need work to meet required design standards, Hartnett said. That cost generally falls on a city or town -- a cost that a community's officials may not want the city to pay, given all the other costs of government and since there are many other roads whose residents could demand the same treatment.
"Recently, over the last five or six years, the Planning Board has been recommending that a street not be accepted unless there are funds to construct to city standards," Hartnett said, speaking generally not about Line Road. He added: "We have a number of unaccepted streets throughout the city."
Mayor Edward M. Lambert Jr. expressed empathy for Almeida's situation in an interview, but said that Fall River could have up to a couple of hundred unaccepted roads. To try to take on the cost of bringing them up to standards could far exceed realistic budget expectations.
Lambert also suggested that perhaps state lawmakers should look into requiring that the limits and drawbacks on unaccepted-road properties be made clear in the property deeds to prospective buyers.
And the conventional wisdom that, if a person pays taxes, he or she is entitled to services seems to get lost when a road is not accepted. Fall River officials said the police and firefighters should respond to any kind of road but that school bus, trash pickup, snow removal and perhaps other services are not guaranteed to those on unaccepted roads.
The limits on services usually factor into a house's lower price and a corresponding lower tax bill.
According to the Fall River tax assessor's office, the city collects property taxes, regardless of whether a road's status has been settled.
In the case of Line Road, Hartnett said, part of it is in Fall River and part is in Tiverton. Both communities and states have different design standards; he said Fall River would have jurisdiction only over its portion. Several houses in the area, Hartnett and Almeida said, were summer homes for decades but have become year-round residences.
On a recent afternoon, a visitor closely followed Almeida's directions, driving to the end of Bridle Way in Tiverton, a wide, paved road bounded by midsized homes, to the end of what's shown on the Official Arrow Street Atlas of Rhode Island.
But there is indeed something that falls off the map: a narrow dirt and pebble road that, if you hang a left, brings you quickly to the home of James Almeida, taxpayer and Fall River resident.
It all started in 2002 when Almeida bought what was a Quonset hut home from Dorothy L. Caron, who had lived there for years.
Some headaches ensued, the main one being installation of a tight-tank, which collects a finite amount of sewage, as the homes in the area are not connected to city sewer and a septic tank cannot be used, under Massachusetts environmental regulations.
Almeida believes there was some kind of leak that apparently filled the tank faster than normal. The tank's alarm, telling someone it needs to be pumped out, invariably sounded at 3 a.m. Pumping out the tank, sometimes once a month or more often, set him back $150 each time, he says.
Then there was the fire a couple of years ago. Almeida worked at an East Providence Cumberland Farms at the time; someone came in around 3 p.m. to say Almeida's home was burning.
"I called the Fall River Fire Department. The department said, 'We don't have the address on Line Road," Almeida recalls. "They said they had a fire on Bridle Way."
But as he was about to hang up, Almeida says, a dispatcher described the burning building as a brown house fronting South Watuppa Pond -- and Almeida knew only he had a home fitting the description.
He says that the Fire Department said it could not get directly to his home, that a fire truck got stuck trying to negotiate the narrow, unaccepted Line Road. Firefighters hauled lines by foot to douse the flames.
Almeida says insurance helped him rebuild.
Another time, he says, basement flooding prompted another call to the Fire Department to have it pumped out. As Almeida tells it, a dispatcher said, "Well, I'm not finding your address, sir."
Had the Fire Department ever been to his home?
Yes, when the old one burned down.
He says the Fire Department asked him to come meet them.
He's dashed off e-mails to various officials and Massachusetts agencies.
"If I was dying, how am I able to find or get help?" reads one. "This is not right, my home burning down should have made the city fix the problem!!!!
"And again they have no clue where I am, but I did get my tax bill. I did get the Building Department to come down and tell me I had to be 18 feet away from Line Road.... I think my life is more important than my tax bill!!!"
In a Dec. 10 message to Massachusetts State Sen. Joan Menard, he added, "I need this corrected Please, PLEASE, I e-mail the Governor, I go to the City, everyone just acts like this is something I should fix? I tried and did what a citizen can do. I need the state/and the city to do their job."
