Sue the city, lawyers tell neighbours of boarded houses

Lawyers defending the owners of the Ambassador Bridge in a multimillion-dollar lawsuit over boarded-up homes in Old Sandwich Towne told a Superior Court judge Friday the plaintiffs should be suing the City of Windsor instead.

“Who’s the cause of what’s being complained of? It’s the city,” lawyer Sheila Block told Justice Thomas Carey in her closing arguments.

In a David-and- Goliath civil trial showdown with the Canadian Transit Co., a group of homeowners in the shadow of the Ambassador Bridge are seeking $16.5 million in damages for transforming their once “ideal neighbourhood” into what they now decry as a slum. Four similar lawsuits are waiting in the wings.

But defence lawyers argued the case is simple and their client is not to blame. The plaintiffs, they said, see the boarded-up homes owned by the bridge company as the cause of their woes, and the bridge company has been “valiantly trying to remove them.”

Harvey Strosberg, acting for the plaintiffs, mockingly called it “the CTC defence” — blaming the municipality for forcing the bridge company to buy and board up more than 100 homes and letting them rot. He said the plaintiffs were “not suggesting the CTC was involved in any criminal activity,” but that it is guilty of having created a nuisance and should be held financially liable.

Citing case law going back to 1610, Emily Sherkey, a lawyer on the defence team, argued that neighbourhoods change and that “neighbours don’t have a right to a neighbourhood remaining the way it is.” She said plaintiffs in a nuisance case must prove “more than something undesirable has come to the neighbourhood.”

The judge, who regularly posed questions during Friday’s closing arguments, said the plaintiffs had argued “the boarding up of a whole chunk of the neighbourhood” created “a blight on the neighbourhood that could have been avoided.”

The lawyers acting for the plaintiffs argued the CTC “didn’t care a whit for its neighbours” and that its conduct was “planned and deliberate to create pressure on the city from the residents of Indian Road, Rosedale Avenue and from the Sandwich neighbourhood.”

During the trial, the CTC, which has acquired about 144 Sandwich properties, said it obtained a quote of just over $15.4 million in late2013 as the estimated cost to make 110 of its properties habitable again. But Strosberg countered the CTC “did not spend a dollar on repairs” since beginning its property acquisitions.

The judge described a neighbourhood petition signed by hundreds calling on the city to acquiesce to the bridge company’s demolition requests as “clearly a bit of a propaganda tool in the 2010 election.”

Given the importance of the span, the bridge company owners argued they had the authority to bulldoze the homes to make way for a twin span and expanded inspections plaza — a plan that has yet to be approved by Ottawa — but decided not to, in part out of “good will” toward the city. Asked by the judge why the CTC hadn’t acted unilaterally, Block said such “selfhelp” on the American side once landed Ambassador Bridge owner Matty Moroun and president Dan Stamper in a Detroit jail.

Carey has reserved judgment.