It's Monday and it's almost the last day of 2013 (thank God!), so let's start off the week with a good ol' fashioned Taylor-Swift's-pissing-off-her-neighbors-once-again story, shall we?
When last we checked in with Taylor's beautiful white seaside manse in the quaint seaside town of Watch Hill, Rhode Island, Taylor had erected a funny no trespassing sign that had received lots of attention. She had also begun the task of getting many of her neighbors to hate her. Oh, and there was that whole thing with the guy who swam two miles in the ocean just to get close to her house.
Yeah, weird.
Well now comes word that Taylor is sort of ticking off the surfing community of Watch Hill (or at least one surfer dude) with some of her unorthodox and possibly shady building practices.
See, it turns out that on the beach in front of Taylor's pearly white mansion, earth movers are in place doing what earth movers do … moving earth. Or sand and rocks to be more precise.
But that was what I imagined Friday on an oceanside walk in Watch Hill when I came upon the fleet of big earth movers working on the cliff below Swift's mansion, busily, well, rearranging the rocky coastline.
One giant machine, part crane, was lifting big appliance-size boulders up out of the ocean with its mechanical claw and moving them.
"That's completely illegal," said a young man standing next to me, some distance away from the Swift beachfront, on a public promontory.
Looking distraught, he added that he is a surfer and is sure the changes to the ocean bottom will impact the quality of surfing there.
Oh man, won't somebody think about the surfers!?!
Okay, while building on your property might not be illegal or even surprising, building what the article says is a very large sea wall without permits or even the proper okay to do so probably is.
Not only is the Swift contractor plucking and moving around big ocean boulders, but they have added a whole new line of rock sea wall on what had previously been a public beach, at a location that appears to be below mean high tide.
Seems the author of the article got curious after coming upon the work going on (photo) at Taylor's beachfront home and decided to investigate. Turns out Taylor's contractor has no permits to basically reconfigure what is (or was) a public beach, and according to officials he most definitely probably maybe (perhaps?) doesn't need any.
After talking with several officials about the matter (most of which sounded pretty uninterested and unconcerned with the very large and probably very expensive building project), writer David Collings spoke with Building Official David Murphy who said that no permit was needed because the work wasn't attached to the house, but said that his department "might revisit the topic Monday" considering the scope of the work being done that they weren't previously aware of.
Yeah, I'm sure they'll revisit it alright. Is anyone else completely unsurprised that Taylor's people don't have to jump through the same building permit hoops a normal person would have to?
Example number 5430 why it's good to be Taylor Swift.
