Court Opinion

ID: 9754107
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-28 19:44:12.791572+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T07:27:48.892111
License: Public Domain

ALEXANDER, J.,
concurring.
[¶ 20] I concur in and join the Court’s opinion. I write separately to emphasize *830two issues regarding interpretation of the Court’s opinion. First, the remedy fashioned by the trial court, and affirmed today, was carefully limited based on the trial court’s findings. It left in place those recently-planted trees and bushes that provided an immediate privacy barrier between O’Leary’s home and yard and the recently constructed Peters home, to the extent that the new home overlooked O’Leary’s home and yard. The Court’s opinion should not be read to suggest that planting of vegetation, when it constitutes a legitimate privacy barrier, may be successfully challenged as a spite fence.
[¶ 21] Second, nothing in the Court’s opinion provides any invitation for neighbors to bring actions against neighbors to force cutting of vegetation to provide the complaining neighbor with a better view. The trial court’s action here was based on unique facts of recent planting of large vegetation that the trial court found to have been planted with malice for the express purpose of obstructing the neighbor’s view. A similar cause of action could not have prevailed to seek removal of vegetation that had grown up naturally over a period of ten or twenty or thirty years, even if that vegetation, growing naturally, had come to obstruct a neighbor’s view.