I had a similar interaction with my local government around fence height. I had a small section of fence connected to a driveway gate and the city told me I ha

I had a similar interaction with my local government around fence height. I had a small section of fence connected to a driveway gate and the city told me I had to remove both as they were too tall. I investigated and sure enough the code as written limited fence height to 3' in a large number of cases, however it did not specifically mention gates. I hired a lawyer and $15,000 later I still had to lower the fence. ;). I did manage to get the gate itself allowed due to the poor wording on the regulation, but the fence, which had been there for >15 years had to go. It looks worse now, but looking good was never the intention of the regulation, oddly enough. During the conversation I actually talked to the enforcement board and brought with me over 150 pictures of other fences on the same road I am on that also clearly violate this. I would estimate there are >10s of thousands of houses in the Portland area that violate this. They indicated they understood that there were probably lots of other violations but did not care. I asked why these other clear violations were not being investigate, and they said they are only required to investigate when there was a complaint. I'll admit I did consider writing an automated job to file a complaint against every home in Portland that has a fence to make a point, but I suspect that point would be lost. One of the problems with complaint based enforcement is the ability to use to to harass people. If for some reason you don't like a neighbor because of their race, political views, favorite sports team, or whatever else passes your mind you can start filing complaints that are clearly not enforced across the population.