WOT: Struggling to get a phone pole removed... Options

[smontanaro]

This is only peripherally car-related, and only because the subject phone pole is blocking one of the bays of my garage. It's also mostly a rant.

When we bought our house a couple years ago it needed a ton of work. It had been neglected for at least a decade. In addition, it had no driveway or garage. We dumped a ton of money into the house and wanted to put a two-car garage on the back alley (where most garages are in Evanston, IL). Unfortunately, at some point in the past whoever puts in phone poles (perhaps Nicor) saw fit to put a pole right in the middle of our back lot line. Our lot is pretty typical, about 40' wide. The pole is 18' from one edge. The kicker on this is that through our entire alley (two whole blocks), every other phone pole (probably 20 or so) is placed at the 'T' formed by the alley and two neighboring lots. Our crummy phone pole is the only one that isn't.

We contacted SBC (now AT&T) at the time. They said Nicor (the local electric company) puts in the poles and SBC removes them. Fine. Nicor comes and puts in a new pole at the 'T' formed by the alley, our lot and our neighbor's lot, that is, where the pole should have been in the first place. They also moved all their wires from the old pole to the new. Didn't charge us a cent. I think it took them less than a day. SBC sends out an engineer to estimate how much it will cost to move their wires (and the cable TV wires) to the new pole and extract the old pole. They come back with a price of $5500. The garage only cost $25K to build. $5500 seemed awfully steep, so I said, "buzz off" (or words to that effect, this being a PG forum). We went ahead and put in the garage, with the required three-foot setback from our neighbor's lot. We could have centered the garage on the phone pole, but then we'd have effectively had no usable space on either side of the garage. At least the way it's positioned we have room on one side for a small vegetable garden.

Time passes, we switch to Sprint for local phone service, they spin off or sell off that business and our new provider becomes Trinsic (nee Z-Tel - got all the major players straight in your head still?). With the advance of nice spring weather and a new /6 in the garage itching to get out I began to have more thoughts about getting rid of that phone pole. I called AT&T. They said, "Call Trinsic." So I did. They initially misunderstood what I was asking and were only going to charge us $135 for the job. I played dumb and crossed my fingers. They got in touch with AT&T who sent out a lineman. Wrong guy. "We'll need to send this over to construction and have an engineer come out and make an estimate." I have a pretty good idea about what that estimate is going to come in at.

So, I'm looking for ideas. An idea came to me tonight (and is mostly why I'm still wide awake at 12:40AM). How about if I pay SBC/AT&T just to move their wires, then pay Comcast just to move their wires, then (after getting any necessary releases from AT&T) pay a local tree service to come and cut the damn thing down? (Shouldn't take them more than an hour or two.) Another idea: do I have a snowball's chance in hell of winning if I sue SBC/AT&T/Trinsic/Z-Tel/Nicor on the grounds that the pole should never have been sited where it is in the first place?

Thx,

Skip Montanaro