Senator Harbin

Letter written to senator Harbin.

Senator Harbin, I have lived in XXXXXXXXXX, XXXXXXXX for all my life. Our family has been living here on the same farm since 1965. First off, just because you don’t know me, I need to say my family and I are good people. We have worked hard for what little we got, and recently have entered a period where life has been rather unfair. I had dropped out of Mercer in order to take care of both my ailing mother at the time and my grandmother who had dementia. I also dropped out to help protect the farm, as the buzzards were circling the place. I was always taught that the most important thing was to take care of one’s family, so at the time I thought I was doing the right thing, but the ride has been a depressing trip to nowheresville ever since. Family members started to die, aunt and cousins disappeared. Pretty soon it was just my mother, the farm, and myself. Even the farm is barely here, as my aunt is determined to sell it, and nothing could force my mother to sell it. We could have paid for it twice over if we had used the same resources that went into caring for my grandmother to purchase it, but that is another unfair part of our story.

Our greatest troubles came from our choice to oppose the approval of a 60 acre solar power plant one parcel over from us. It was to be positioned on a hill that sloped down overlooking the headwaters of the little potato creek, which is a tributary of the flint river. The problems did not arrive during our opposition, but a year or two after it was called off due to federal restrictions on the importation of Chinese manufactured solar panels. This was when the landowner who wanted the solar power plant began to use his political ties to come after us. It all was little things at first, like calling the sheriff on us every time we stepped out of our house, or getting his friends to stalk us around town. Now it has blown into something quite serious, and personal. We know he hired an attorney, and once he learned he couldn’t sue us for exercising our rights, it is fairly apparent the two dreamed up a plan to unjustifiably come after us. Because the attorney he hired is unscrupulous, he knew something we didn’t, he knew that as long as our farm remained a part of my grandmother’s estate, we didn’t possess enough legal standing to bring anything to trial. Which meant, we were defenseless as far as illegal development was concerned. So, they exploited us, and went after what would hurt us the most, our family’s farm. This would be a means for him and his associates to profit off of illegally developing all the land surrounding our farm, cheat the taxpayer, and provide ample opportunity to destroy our home and pressure us into moving out of the county.

His associates in the Sheriff’s department have participated by applying muscle in order to squeeze us, but the most damage came from the destruction of the rural area around our home through openly acknowledged illegal building practices. The acquisition of land for this development was acquired through highly suspect means by the landowner’s cousin, who is also the county fire chief. This occurred when the Chief was caught squatting on a former neighbor’s land while that neighbor was quarantined with COVID, and was brokering the sale of our former neighbor’s land across the street from our home. He was doing this without the backing of a real estate brokerage license, was in no way related, and received a house and some land at a severely discounted price. Once we heard of the Chief selling the land, we immediately fell suspicious over the arrangement. We wrote to the neighbor five times, never receiving a response, only to discover our letters never reached him. The Chief was involved in the sale in order to ensure we could not purchase it, and to set the stage for what followed next. For setting up this sham, the chief benefited greatly from brokering the land sale to a fellow firefighter without a real estate brokerage license. Afterwards the development itself was performed without building permits, openly violating federal environmental statutes, and by granting special exemptions to subdivision development for development plans that never should have qualified. The county authority zoning ordinance administrator has remained openly hostile, obviously dishonest, and intentionally negligible throughout the entire affair. The tax assessor, another close associate, concealed most of these exchanges and plans for development by neglecting to update the online public records for a year and a half on one occasion.

As you could guess, the county government is completely aware of everything, informed me I could file complaints, but assured me of their disappearance and that nothing would ever come of it. The chairman of the county commission doesn’t even return my emails, and is result to allow no one to ever be held accountable. We have had our property vandalized, the neighbors they installed across the street stalk us on a regular basis, our house was swatted without a warrant or anyone there, and our mailbox was stolen the day before Christmas eve. In September I was “detained” for the first time in my life, for practically no reason, with a fabricated police report. We have tried to acquire a restraining order at least three times already, and are told that because these people are our new neighbors we cannot get one.

What I am getting at is these laws that are being violated are not local, but state and federal. There has to be some oversight authority, some options for people in similar situations. It only makes sense that counties should be responsible for upholding the laws of the state and the laws of the nation. Lawfulness and civil rights cannot just end at the county border.

We are trying to get the word out about what is happening to us, which is right now the only way we know of combating it. We have contacted a few of the local news stations without a response, and we will continue contacting them in the hopes of gaining some coverage. Everything that has happened to us has been documented in one form or another, so we will be putting that online in a website. We would appreciate any help we could get, and are thankful for the time dedicated to reading this letter. I wish you all the best, and thanks for being our senator.