YAKIMA, Wash. —  Viviano Ramirez's new fence, a nice illegal fence, could cause trouble for a lot of homeowners in Yakima.

Ramirez lives on a corner lot at Ninth Avenue and Spruce Street near Davis High School and Yakima Regional Medical and Cardiac Center. His yard is cramped, so a year or two ago he decided to build his fence out to the curb on Spruce.

Months later, he got a visit from Code Administration. They politely told him his fence was encroaching the city's right-of-way.

Remove it, they ordered. Never mind that some of his neighbors have even older fences that also encroaches the grassy strip along Spruce.

"They said, 'You can tell on them, or go ahead and apply for a right-of-way permit and hope for the best,'" Ramirez recounts. "Well, I didn't want to tell on anybody."

So Ramirez applied for a permit after the fact. And when it was inevitably denied, he appealed all the way to City Hall.

The Ramirez fence has touched off a new debate on an old problem in Yakima: namely, the proliferation of illegal fences on public property where utilities, such as sewer and water lines, are often located.

The problem is just one example of the continuing fallout caused by the city's shortage of sidewalks, an amenity that commonly distinguishes urban places from suburban or rural areas.

No hard numbers exist, but city officials estimate the city has 198 linear miles of sidewalk for 500 miles of streets. Some streets have sidewalks on one side of the street, some have both and some have none at all.

One thing sidewalks do, aside from giving pedestrians a place to walk and children to play, is help define the city's right of way.

"If it's a neighborhood with sidewalks, then we rarely have problems" with encroachment, says Bill Cook, the city's economic and development director. "If there's no sidewalk, the chances are much higher that somebody's in the city's right-of-way."

That's exactly the situation in Ramirez's neighborhood. His house, a spacious two-story Craftsman built in 1923, faces Ninth Avenue, which has sidewalks on both sides of the street.

For the most part, Spruce Street has only grassy medians -- no sidewalks on either side -- which can make it hard to discern the transition from right-of-way to yard.

A permit is not needed to build a fence on private property, and Ramirez says he was only going by another neighbor's fenceline when he rebuilt his fence. At least three of his neighbors along Spruce clearly have fences into the right-of-way. Another has a large sailboat semi-permanently parked there as well.

It didn't seem like a big deal at the time. There's no sidewalk on the grassy strip alongside his house. The strip is unusually wide, his yard is cramped, and he and his wife, Tracy, are raising three active girls.

"I realize now I should have checked the property line more carefully," he says. "But look up and down the street. I'm just asking for fairness here."

Cook says Ramirez's mistake -- eyeballing a neighbor's fenceline -- is a common one.

"I don't know that many folks realize they're doing it," he says. "If the first fence is illegal, that's the beginning of the problem."

The city does not keep track of right-of-way encroachment complaints or citations.

However, the City Council wrestled with two similar encroachment appeals last fall, and after the Ramirez appeal, the council decided it was time to study the issue more in-depth.

The first order of business was to ask city staff for more insight into the scope of the problem.

Councilwoman Kathy Coffey says the goal ultimately is to deal with violations and appeals on a consistent basis. She chairs the council's Neighborhood Development Committee.

"I think there's going to be a compromise on his part, but we don't know what it is yet, and there's no sense of him doing anything about it until we figure out what to do," Coffey said.

Other members of the council who sit on the committee say they also want consistent enforcement.

One of them, Councilman Neil McClure, was instrumental in the city's decision 10 years ago to require sidewalks on both sides of the street in new developments.

McClure says the balance is protecting the city's right-of-way "but not going crazy and making everybody take out their fences."

"But having every case a special case," he warns, "that's not how it's going to be."

Bill Lover, another council member who sits on the Neighborhood Development committee, says the Ramirez fence has definitely opened a can of worms.

Much depends on the scope of the problem, he says. A report is expected later this month.

"Where this discussion is going to go, I don't know yet," he says. "If we grandfather him in, then what? Where do we start and where do we stop?"

* Chris Bristol can be reached at 577-7748 or cbristol@yakimaherald.com.