Feud Over Junkyard Drones On After Four Years Of Legal Fights, Man Faces Deadline Today To Clean Up Illegal Site

The dozens of rusted cars, rotting tires, broken boats and crumpled trailers were bad enough.

Then came the alternative: a sight-blocking fence made of mobile home siding, nailed together in strips, standing 6 feet high and stretching the length of five football fields.

Right beside Don Tryon’s home.

“The fence almost looks worse than the junk,” said Tryon, who refers to neighbor Alden Arveson’s place as a graveyard for “all the ugly sins of the world.”

The fence is just the latest barrier in a four-year battle to get Arveson to clean up his illegal back-yard junkyard.

The controversy has spawned three court orders and judicial threats of fines and jail for Arveson; it has cost Kootenai County at least $10,000 in time and legal fees.

It’s also an example of a growing county phenomenon: Illegal junkyards, it seems, are everywhere, prompting complaints from neighbors that are increasingly difficult to resolve.

“I’d say 80 percent of our complaints these days involve junkyards,” Planning Director Cheri Howell said this week.

Government workers suspect as many as 100 junkyards operate in the county without proper permits or insurance. Some are new, but many are just being discovered by new rural residents such as Tryon.

In winter 1992, Tryon was looking to buy the home on five acres next door to Arveson. He saw some - but not all - of his neighbor’s scrap metal.

“You couldn’t see much; there was 6 to 8 feet of snow,” Tryon said.

Melting snow and a court-ordered inventory later revealed more than 170 items on Arveson’s property - ranging from boats to motors to machine parts. Most are holdovers from his years of collecting and crushing old automobiles.

Arveson’s operation never had been legal, but no one had cared. He lived tucked away on 15 wooded acres.

“We only enforce that ordinance based on complaints,” said Dave Daniel, county building chief.

And complain Tryon did. Before buying his home, he was assured Arveson’s place was illegal and would be shut down.

“We have a fire pit out back and like to have guests over,” he said. “We didn’t want to have to look at that.”

Arveson, meanwhile, paints the dispute as a function of growth. New residents buy cheap rural land, build nice houses then complain that he brings down land values, he said.

“Maybe when they come up to Idaho they should stop being Californians,” he said. “I moved out to this piece of property because I couldn’t keep up with those kind of standards.”

No one guessed how long the feud would last.

At Tryon’s urging, county workers in spring 1992 gave Arveson 30 days to clean his mess and fence his land. When he hadn’t by late summer 1992, officials gave him another 60 days.

Nothing had changed by May 1994, and the county took Arveson to court. Two missed deadlines later, Arveson earned a suspended five-day jail sentence and grudgingly began his cleanup chore.

“I’m a guy working alone,” Arveson said. “I’m doing the best I can.”

The pace has been slow, but the judge has refused to jail Arveson. He was, at least, making progress.

His final deadline is today and Arveson’s yard, while cleaner, still is littered with metal. But he has erected his fence.

An infuriated Tryon quickly discovered the three-tone metal will remain.

“It’s ugly, there’s no doubt about it, but we don’t regulate beauty,” Daniel, the building chief, said. “There’s no definition of what you can use to build a fence, as long as it’s under 6 feet.”

Arveson won’t say if it was erected to bait Tryon.

“I was ordered to put up a fence so I built that with what I had,” he said. “Cost me $600.”

Still, Arveson fears the judge’s patience may be up and worries he may be headed for jail.

“Maybe I should go on the lam,” he said. “I saw what they (the government) did up in Naples” he said, referring to Randy Weaver’s now famous Ruby Ridge siege.

Tryon, meanwhile, is considering relocating.

And Daniel, along with other county workers, laments the lost time and dollars.

“After four years he still has his junkyard and the neighbors are still complaining,” Daniel said, and there’s really “not much more we can do.”

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Color Photo; Graphic: Illegal junk yard