A couple battling Flin Flon City Hall over the cost of three sewer backups has taken their case to the Manitoba Ombudsman.
Wayne and Deanna Carriere can’t understand how they’re at fault for the backups, saying the problem was a disconnected water main on a neighbour’s property.
“When that main is disconnected, we cannot go onto another street into another neighbour’s yard and hire a backhoe to come and fix it. That’s just not allowed,” said Wayne Carriere. “The city would not allow it, [the neighbours] would not allow it, so how can that be our problem? We can’t go in and fix it.”
Deanna Carriere added that a plumber flat-out told the couple the sewage backups into their basement were not their fault.
The Centennial Crescent couple appeared before city council last year but failed to convince them to take responsibility for the backups and reimburse the clean-up costs.
Now the Carrieres have asked the Manitoba Ombudsman, an independent office of the legislative assembly, to investigate council’s decision.
The Ombudsman’s mandate includes determining the “fairness” of decisions made by municipal governments, according to the office’s website.
The Carrieres provided a letter from the Ombudsman confirming a preliminary investigation into the matter. They were asked to wait until sometime in June for a response.
Shelley Penziwol, communications coordinator for the Ombudsman, was not at liberty to comment on the situation.
“The legislation we work under requires us to operate with a certain level of privacy and confidentiality,” she told The Reminder. “…we’re not able to comment on any pending or current investigations.”
The city’s insurer has determined the backups stemmed from a problem with the Carrieres’ private sewer line, not the public line.
“We’re standing behind the insurer at this point in time because they’re the expert, we’re not,” Mayor Cal Huntley told the Carrieres last year.
The city has the option of paying some or all of the couple’s damages out of its own budget, rather than with insurance money; however, Chief Administrative Officer Mark Kolt has called this a “very difficult” notion because taking a contrary position on a claim could potentially see the city lose the benefit of its insurance.
Deanna Carriere said the couple is out between $24,000 and $30,000 in repair costs for their sewage-flooded basement, time off work and the cost of installing a new back-up valve to replace the one destroyed by the first back-up.
She said the couple’s basement – a fully developed space where her son had his bedroom – is still ripped apart because they can’t afford to fix it at this time.
The couple said the back-ups occurred in a span of just over 10 months in 2016: on January 2, January 11 and October 12. There have been no problems since crews dug up the water main near their home after the third backup.
If the Ombudsman ultimately sides with the city, Deanna Carriere said the matter will not be over.
“We’ll try something else. We are not quitting,” she said.
