Water World

          Clearly, I live in a town that hires people who don't know shit about how runoff from one person's brodingnagian castle can turn all the homes around them into disaster areas in a storm.
          However, for the low, low price of $8K -- that's $8,000 fahrenheit -- the floodwater from the runoff caused by the construction of the huge houses behind me can be alleviated. Turns out, instead of locating catch basins in the middle of the properties so excess water from the roof could be collected and sent to the street, the catch basins were positioned at the back of the properties, right next to my yard, so the excess water flows downhill -- right toward me.
          The water fills up the catch basins and overflows into my yard and my window wells, then cascades like Niagara Falls into my basement. A landscape architect I called came by to give me the heartstopping estimate. This solution entails the installation of a buried 18-inch pipe leading to a sistern across the back of my yard, which then leads to another pipe and another sistern in the back of my neighbor's yard, and so on and so on, through the backs of all the other yards until our neighborhood pipes reach the pipes of the village street sewers.
           But -- and it's not a good but -- in order to perform this engineering feat, all the houses on the block have to agree to the plan. And they each have to pony up $8,000 like me. Yep. We victims get to correct a problem caused by the village's incompetent engineers and the greedy builders who continue to construct these monster homes.

          My first reaction was that the houses behind us should be paying for this solution. Duh. Naturally, this being the village from hell, the owners of said houses are under absolutely no obligation to make amends for the oceans of rain water which spew off their runway-sized slabs of concrete onto our properties. Nope. No obligation at all.