It would have been great if Del Webb was more forward thinking and had all the electric/telephone lines in Phase One buried underground like the other phases. It would be impossible to try to get access to do it now. Are all the homes in Phase 3 "all electric"?
Were residential electric utilities commonly run underground in the '60s? My neighbor a couple years ago was told by the county there was an 8-foot easement for utilities along her rear property line (Phase 1 in a section built in '61). Her understanding was each property had the 8-foot easement, thus a 16-foot wide corridor. She ignored them and put her fence about a foot inside the line anyway, saying if they ever tore it out she'd just put a new one up. I looked at my deed and found no such restrictions. Anyone know the real story? Electric and COX are on poles and phone is underground in these corridors. I have no idea where the gas lines are.
Utility Easements run with the original plat as filed with the County. They may not show up on individual property plats, but they have been there all along. The 8' easement is to allow utilities unfettered access to all buried lines and pipes within the platted land. The gas also runs across the back and along the side easement (4 foot) up to the house. No one ever knows about easements until something like a broken water line or telephone cable and here comes the backhoe to dig up the properties in question.
Don't even get me started on setbacks. There is no consistency and anyone looking to do an addition or even add on covered space should get the county involved via permitting. It's ludicrous. Living on the corner of Hutton, we had to build the wall 12 feet off the sidewalk. Then nothing within 10 feet inside the wall could be added (we wanted to put the pool equipment there (that is 22 feet we lost on that side for setbacks). Across the back of the lot was an 8 foot setback and on the neighbors side, there was an additional 5 foot inside the wall. You can do the math if you want but the county virtually took nearly 20 percent of the property away from us. Here's the real kicker: DEVCO sold premium lots (larger than 10,000 sq feet) for $500 more. Typically they were on corners or on a cul-de-sac. And to top it all off, our neighbor directly across the street has a knee wall right on the property line on the Hutton side. Every lot is apparently different dependent on where you are and when things were built.
