Maine Homeowners Face $2 Million Fine for Poisoning Neighbor’s Trees

Neighbors can be a really weird thing.

I feel like when I lived in apartments in my younger days, you had two kinds of neighbors... Ones that were cool and respected the other tenants around them, or the ones that were super entitled and acted like they were the only people that lived in the building. Never mind disputes over parking or anything like that.

Entitlement is also a really weird thing. Why do we live in a world these days, where people think that they're more important than someone else? This rings especially true where money is concerned. People always use whatever they have, as an excuse to be one-up on someone with less. Not always, but it's a pretty consistent human trait now.

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Rich neighbors can present even more of a challenge.

Naturally, if living on the coast, or on a lake, or near a river or whatever, you want your enjoyment of that area to be maxed right out. You want to live in a world of pure bliss. Who could blame you? But unless you've chosen to do this alone out in the willy-wacks somewhere, you just might have neighbors.

What's not cool, is when you decide that to maximize your enjoyment, you have to ruin someone else's. This goes back to that whole entitlement thing... In Camden over the last couple years, this issue is a hot-button that has the town in a bit of an uproar.

The Gorman's have owned property in Camden since 2002. Their neighbors have not.

The Gormans have owned a piece of property in Camden since 2002. Before that, they lived in the Southern Maine area, and are Mainers through and through. If the Gorman name sounds familiar, Lisa Gorman's late husband was the chairman of LL Bean... The Gorman's neighbors, the Bonds, bought a house next to them just a few years ago.

A short while ago, Lisa Gorman noticed trees in her yard were dying. After having her landscaper inspect them, it was obvious the trees had been poisoned by a strong pesticide. After some investigation, it came out that the Bonds had not only poisoned trees in the Gorman's yard, they had to come on the property to do it, so it seemed intentional.

All for a better view...

The reason for all this, as it came out later, the Bonds were looking to create a better ocean view from their home. But it goes so much further. Among other changes they made to their property that weren't allowed, the pesticide they used, which they said they brought from their permanent home in Missouri, is now being detected at Laite Memorial Beach.

So now this chemical that's not intended for residential use, Tebuthiuron, is showing up in a public beach, and likely headed for the Atlantic. So there's a lot of fallout from what started as hoping to see that very same ocean. At this point, according to the Portland Press Herald, there's still a lot of moving parts and this situation is far from over.

Maine is a state that has been welcoming tourists here for as long as people have wanted to travel. But we don't love it if you come and trash the place. If we have to follow the rules, so should people from other places. Regardless of how many zeroes there are at the end of the amount in your bank account.

Here are some more places you could buy a lovely home...