Greenwood and its residents are fed up with utility crews leaving behind messes in their yards and neighborhoods, but the city is limited in forcing a clean up.
In the last few years, residents have reported that their yards were destroyed. Holes the utility crews dug in the ground were filled with sand, cheap sod or covered with plywood in more extreme cases. Residents have taken pictures of crooked utility boxes, exposed wires and large equipment that had been left behind for days.
The list goes on.
The city has fined the companies, including MetroNet Fiber, AT&T and Comcast, which all have a presence in Greenwood, for cutting into water and gas lines, and has threatened to pull subcontractors’ permits if they don’t come up with a plan to clean up their messes and present that plan to the city within a reasonable period of time, Mayor Mark Myers said.
[sc:text-divider text-divider-title=”Story continues below gallery” ]
Click here to purchase photos from this galleryThe companies get the messes cleaned up. But then it happens again and again.
In fact, 22 gas lines were cut in 2018, Myers said.
“One is too much for me, but I understand it happens,” said Myers, who used to work as a construction safety specialist.
Even after the damage is done and the companies are notified by residents or the city, crews aren’t coming back and repairing it.
MetroNet reported 17 service tickets for clean up or restoration in the last three months, all of which were responded to within 24 hours, said Keith Leonhardt, the company’s vice president of marketing.
“Failure to comply with our practices will result in a contractor’s termination,” Leonhardt said.
MetroNet’s President, John Cinelli, recently flew in to meet with Mayor Mark Myers to discuss the many issues the city has had with the regional internet provider.
Myers asked for the meeting due to dissatisfaction with the way the company’s contractors were doing work in the community, he said.
During one incident last summer, the city and INDOT had to shut down State Road 135 during rush hour on a Friday afternoon and close several businesses in the area because a MetroNet crew bore through a main gas line, Myers said.
In another instance, while installing cable TV at a Greenwood residence, they bore through the middle of a sewer lateral, he said.
On several different occasions, residents have complained to the city that sewers were backing up into their yards and houses, a direct result of errors on the utility crews’ part, he said.
It’s a combination of issues with the most dangerous being the severed gas lines, Myers said.
Conversations and a slap on the wrist here and there is about all the city can do due to these companies’ access to utility easements.
Homes that have been built in the last six decades have right-of-ways in the front, back and side yards that allow for utility crews, including those that provide electricity and water, to have access to yards. They have to have access in case power fails, sewer lines bust or gas lines blow up, and residents, even homeowners, can’t control them doing work on their property. Neither can the city.
“Legally, we can’t stop them,” Myers said.
But other utility companies, such as those that provide cable, internet and phone service to residents in a community, have the same access, and they’re constantly battling it out for who gets the most customers, which can lead to quickly done, sloppy work, he said.
A lot of times, when a service is cut or transferred, the wires are capped and left behind — underground, on polls and on homes. Years of this has led to the problems residents and utility companies are having today, said MetroNet, which has about 300 miles of underground fiber optic cable in the Greenwood area.
“Decades of utility infrastructure construction has left thousands of miles of underground utilities in Indiana. The entire utility industry faces the challenge of unmapped and unmarked underground infrastructure,” MetroNet said in a statement.
“Our safe underground construction practices require our contractors to always notify 811 within required time frames to locate and mark buried lines, conduct contractor ‘walk-throughs’ to inspect construction areas and to hand dig or hydrovac — a form of excavation using water — to physically locate the utilities.”
The companies blame the contractors, who blame the subcontractors, who blame the markers. The markers say they have a hard time locating lines and pipes because they’re not where they’re supposed to be.
“It got to the point where we were sending our own crews out to monitor their work, which is a total waste of our time,” Myers said.
In the summer of 2017, city leaders sat down with multiple contractors and subcontractors who had been doing work in the area to come up with a plan for better and safer practices. The deal was, in order to keep their permit, they would clean up any yard they caused damage to within 32 hours.
“Our hands are tied. The only thing we can do is red tag them – pull their permit and make them come in with a plan,” Myers said.
The mayor believed that solved the problem. But last year, the city started receiving calls again from angry residents.
“I couldn’t tell you how many. (Problems) ranged anywhere from sewers backing up, to yards that were tore up and they didn’t fix it,” he said.
“We all sat around and made promises. That didn’t work.”
One option the city was weighing as a possible solution was to pull a blanket permit which allows utility crews to work anywhere in the city, as long as it’s in a right-of-way, once it expires.
But there’s a clause in the contract that says it is renewable for up to 15 years, so it will be years before the city could do that, Myers said.
And even if they did issue permits by neighborhood or on a case-by-case basis, it would pose some risks for customers who depend on these companies’ services and add to the city’s workload.
Neighborhoods that have had significant problems are the Wakefield subdivision at State Road 37 and Smith Valley Road, and Ashton Park off Smith Valley Road near Greenwood Community High School.
All of those complaints were lodged at MetroNet or AT&T.
“As we work to expand and enhance our fiber network to deliver ultra-high speeds to the Greenwood area, our goal is to minimize the effect on residents as much as possible. We will continue to work with residents and the community to resolve any issues,” AT&T said in a statement, but did not answer any specific questions about the problems residents reported.
Sue Steele lives in Ashton Park, where she’s president of her homeowner’s association.
Her front yard and her neighbor’s front yard is covered with mesh after AT&T dug holes, inches from their driveways, during installation of a fiber-optic service in the neighborhood, a service Steele doesn’t even plan to use.
She understands that the utility company had a right to do it, but they should have put her yard back the way it was, she said looking out at it from a front window of her home.
“They just dug and dug and dug. They were supposed to grade it, but instead they put down mesh and straw and cheap grass seed. Half of what comes up is weeds,” Steele said.
“It’s too cold to do anything now. I know that. But come spring, I want that filled up properly. Personally, I want sod, which is what was there before.”
She cares about the way her yard looks, she said. Her neighbors do, too. She estimated 75 percent of the folks who live in her neighborhood are more than 80 years old.
“We can’t get out and fix this mess ourselves. We’re subject to fall,” Steele said.
She can’t even get out there and water her garden or grass anymore. Really, there’s no point, she said.
She reached out to AT&T, but the company is impossible to get a hold of, she said. But she has talked to the contractor responsible for the work in her yard. They said they’d come back out and look at the mess, but she’s at home all day most days and she hasn’t seen anyone come out, she said. She’s called repeatedly.
As homeowner association president, she’s received complaints from several other residents as well.
“All the neighbors are ranting and raving,” she said.
One said a utility crew busted their sewer line. They had to pay $4,750 out of their own pockets to have it repaired because the contractor said they couldn’t pay that much. They wrote the homeowner a $1,083 check, Steele said.
Another resident spent more than $2,000 to have her sewer line repaired, not even thinking to ask the utility company or contractor to pay for their mistake, she said.
Joe Stumpf also lives in Ashton Park. He said the neighborhood was torn up two summers in a row — first by MetroNet, then by AT&T.
Last summer, AT&T took so long to finish work in his yard that the subcontractor who marks where lines are buried had to come out at least three times to redo the markings, Stumpf said.
When they finally started digging, he was left with two large holes in his yard. The utility workers covered the holes with 4-foot slabs of plywood, he said.
“You could’ve fallen through it if you stepped on it,” said Stumpf, a retired minister.
Crews left their equipment, even large machinery, in the neighborhood for two or three months, he said.
Ashton Park residents held a neighborhood-wide meeting to discuss the problems, and Steele promised she’d do her best to tackle them.
She is dedicated to being a voice for her entire community, she said.
“I’m not just going to let this go. I am bound and determined to get my yard back,” she said.
“If you don’t have somebody demanding the best service, this is what’s going to happen. I want my yard fixed back like it was. I want all of our yards fixed.”
