Illegal dumping!

I had an interesting interaction today with a city code enforcement officer. I received a letter accusing me of "illegally dumping" because a hot tub was placed in the alley adjacent to a neighbouring property for one of my rentals. I.e. not on my property.

So, I emailed the code enforcement officer and told him that it wasn't my hot tub, and it wasn't on my property, so there's nothing I could do to help him.

This morning, he sent me a very aggressively-worded reply saying that he has all kinds of evidence that the hot tub was at my property and that I must remove it from the alley or be fined for every day it stays where it is.

Here's the interesting thing: there was a hot tub at the property in question when I bought it. Because I did not want to be the landlord of a hot tub, and because I did want a hot tub at my house, I had the hot tub removed....and moved to my personal residence...where it remains to this day!

After getting the email from the code enforcement agent, I decided that I was probably going to have to fight. So I called an attorney I have used multiple times for small municipality issues, and he agreed to take over communication with the code enforcement agent. He sent me a link to pay the fee.

As I was getting ready to pay the lawyer to take over, another email from the code enforcement agent arrived. It was an apology. After my first email, he found old pictures from the MLS of the hot tub that was on my property, and was able to confirm that it wasn't the same as the hot tub that was in the alley.

He concluded his second email saying, "I now believe this is nothing more than a very strange, extremely unlikely and strong coincidence of timing. In almost 30 years of doing this job I’ve never experienced anything remotely so unusual."
I replied thanking him for looking more closely at the issue, and telling him that I still have the hot tub he saw on the MLS photos, and that it is now at my personal residence. I sent him a photo.

So then I called up the lawyer and apologized for wasting his time. He laughed and said to call him next time I need him.
And all is now well in the real estate empire.