Willful Trespass?

Location: Georgia

Tenant next door sends me a text last year asking if he can “drain my pool in your yard”. I was at the hospital with the Mrs and didn’t respond. Come home to a muddy mess. Find out the owner (previous neighbor) has ran a discharge pipe from his pool to the property line discharging pool water onto our property. Call the owner, get a little heated and he agrees to divert the discharge. They couple a 2” discharge hose to the pipe and route it elsewhere.

Noticed this spring that our shade trees, 100’ + tulip poplars are declining/dead. Start investigating. Find out the neighbors pool is unpermitted. Not only unpermitted, but built in the natural drainage easement. The easement was 20’ wide, not so much anymore. Have soil samples taken in 3 locations along the path of dying trees. All show high sulfides, a gradient or bloom pattern also. High fluorides, the gamut. Even after a year of rerouting.

I have overlays, soil sample results, text messages )“can I drain my pool in your yard?” “We’ll fix it” “I wouldn’t want anyone making a mess in my yard”) along with testimony from someone who heard the tenant say “the owner told me to dump the water when they didn’t have cars in the driveway”.

I’ve consulted with a local, certified arborist who seems to be…lacking. He told me he’s having to have his friend “analyze the findings from UGA because he didn’t understand them”.

So, what do I need to do? I’m not an arborist but I’m confident that my trees were killed due to a combination of runoff and salt water disposal.

The pool was built around 2007. The discharge pipe was hidden behind his privacy fence, which rotted away in the winter of 24. It was still hidden because of our wooded lot. Only after we started a landscaping project (in hindsight we were trying to mitigate the runoff caused by the encroachment) and the tenant washed away about $1000 of decorative #57 stone and sent the goofy text.

Please advise.