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Call Kurtis: Fix My Sound Wall!

Scarred by 25 years of car accidents and new brick, the concrete sound wall along Manzanita Avenue in Carmichael has endured a lot.

"You can see where the damage has been repaired," said Joe Perri, whose house sits on the other side of the wall, in a cozy neighborhood one might never know was there.

Perri can't see the wall from his backyard either, with shrubs and tall wooden fence along the border of his property.

At least, he thought they were along the border of his property -- until a car crash on Manzanita left a gaping hole in the sound wall last year, he said.

"Various departments tell me it's not their repsonsiblity, it's mine," he said. "I don't want to spend any more time on this."

Since the crash, homeless people and animals have climbed through the gap, living between the sound wall and his fence, he said, and he has spent months trying to plead with Sacramento County officials to fix the wall, as they did for his neighbor Larry Hoffart.

"Mine was a little bit easier than this," said a smiling Hoffart, adding that the hole in his backyard was even bigger than this one.

So if the County fixed holes in the wall before, why won't it fix the wall this time?

"If somebody can produce something that shows it's in the county right of way, we will certainly fix it," said Sacramento County's Gary Kodani.

County maps indicate the wall is not county property after all -- it's private property belonging to Perri and his neighbors, he said.

"We can't find any real justification why it was repaired at that time," Kodani said, concluding that it must have been a mistake when the County fixed the wall before.

In order to even see his wall, however, Perri said he has to walk out his front door, weave his way out and around his subdivision and then stop along the busy Manzanita Avenue behind his house -- a half-mile trek.

But Perri said he really has no choice but to fix the wall himself, or pay a $500 deductible on his insurance.

"I don't want to spend any more time on this."

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