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Photo by Wayne Cuddington / Postmedia

In 2002, the city did a rebuild on Tweedsmuir and actually lowered the street, creating an elevation gap with his front lawn, McIntyre said. Instead of leaving him with a steep slope, he said the city built the retaining wall on the edge of the sidewalk, almost the entire width of his property, or about 10 metres.

In the fall of that year, he rebuilt his front steps and added a four-metre section that married with the city’s knee-high wall to make an L-shape towards his front door. It was a neat and tidy finished product.

Then came the sidewalk sweeper damage, curiously at about midnight on April 11, 2018, when the machine struck the wall and misaligned several of the stones, leaving a bow in the middle.

McIntyre inquired about repairing the wall and says he was told to send photographs, get two reputable estimates and go ahead with the work. After it was completed a few weeks later, he submitted a claim to the city for the $1,932 bill.

This is where things got weird.

Firstly, the city denied ever putting up the wall. Secondly, it claimed that McIntyre had built the wall himself and had done so on the city road allowance, building an illegal “encroachment” without getting permission. His wall, his damage, his problem.

He was stunned. “Do they not even know what they’ve built?” To support his case, he pointed to a second wall a little further south on Tweedsmuir built at the same time with the same materials, also by the city.

Photo by Wayne Cuddington / Postmedia

Months went by without action on the claim and McIntyre grew impatient. When it became clear he was going to court, the city went out and surveyed his property again, proving that the wall was partly or entirely on the public section of the roadway, which he knew from the beginning. The legal department then went about producing a number of defendant’s “book of documents,” with photos, blueprints, denials and “will say” summaries.