House is broke, but who'll fix it?

In January 2008, Pete and Ethel Nelson of Victoria grew anxious about the Metropolitan Council's big sewer project next to their house when a construction crane fell over on the site.

Two months later, a crane toppled again, narrowly missing the Nelsons' roof and tearing down their electrical and phone lines. Then in the summer, as the excavation work shook the Nelsons' house, a crevice opened in their driveway and a large swath of their yard sank.

More than a year later, the $7 million sewer upgrade is mostly finished. But the Nelsons' effort to get the Met Council to repair the damage to their property has been trapped in legal limbo. In March, the Met Council offered to pay the Nelsons $25,000, but that barely covers what they've spent on lawyers since last year.

For Pete Nelson and others in Victoria, the issue goes beyond damage claims to the way the Met Council treats citizens who complain about its projects.

"They refuse to say they've done anything wrong," Nelson said. He compares the experience to living in a sinking submarine. "I couldn't imagine it would be as horrible as it is. ... This should not have to go on so long."

Reacting to the criticism, the Met Council will improve its response to complaints about future projects, including designating a single point of contact for citizens and creating a "dispute resolution process that will quickly resolve issues as they arise," according to Met Council spokeswoman Bonnie Kollodge.

Victoria City Council member Kim Roden said she's hesitant to allow the next phase of the sewer project, which will cut through a major artery in her town, until the regional government changes its ways.

"I would like to see the Met Council step up and get a proper resolution for this," Roden said. "The jury's still out on how seriously they're going to take this."

The installation of a deep sewer along Smithtown Road is part of a larger, $45 million project to provide safer and more reliable service to fast-growing northern Carver County. The challenges of the project were many -- it involved damming a channel that connects Lake Victoria and Lake Minnetonka and digging a 35-foot deep trench with homes close by on either side.

"It's all very, very difficult construction work," said Bryce Pickart, assistant general manager in the Met Council's environmental services unit. After starting the work in November 2007, workers encountered poor soils that delayed the project for four months and increased the cost by $700,000.

The project also couldn't proceed without taking a chunk of Pete and Ethel Nelson's property on Smithtown Terrace. The couple, both in their 60s, have lived on the waterfront property since 1987. He's an executive with an information technology company. She's a schoolteacher. The Met Council paid them $30,000 for an easement.

In the Nelsons' view, that couldn't compensate them for the disruption to come. The first crane collapse was blamed on an operator who failed to stabilize it properly, Pickart said. The following month, there was an electrical fire, Nelson said, followed by the second crane collapse in March 2008. Also blamed on operator error, that mishap crushed some bushes and pavers after it ripped down the wires.

"When that happened, we immediately shut down the contractor," Pickart said. The construction company, S.M. Hentges and Sons Inc., hired a new subcontractor to operate the cranes.

Nelson thinks the more significant destruction came later in the year, during the installation and removal of "sheet pilings" used to shore up the trench. The vibration knocked books off the shelves and cups from the cupboards, he said. The Met Council spent $375 to fix cracks in the Nelsons' chimney that it maintains were not caused by the construction. But Nelson thinks the shaking has cracked his foundation.

"The land is moving, the house is twisting, the roofline is changing," Nelson said.

Met Council member Craig Peterson, who represents the area, acknowledged the Nelsons' ordeal.

"We substantially changed the landscape of their home and their lot for an extended period of time, much longer than we had hoped to," Peterson said.

The Nelsons filed a damage claim in September 2008. But they found themselves having to deal with the contractor's insurance company, as well as the Met Council. Last year, independent consultants hired and paid for by the Met Council inspected the Nelsons' home and then produced reports in March, concluding that while the slumping yard and cracked driveway were likely the result of construction, the cracks in the Nelsons' foundation must have already been there. Nelson counters that the consultants never saw the property before the Met Council's project started.

"You want to be fair and equitable with homeowners and communities, because you have to go back time and again and do this," Kollodge said. "It's not reasonable to pay for unsubstantiated claims or pre-existing kinds of things."

After paying more than $20,000 in legal fees, the Nelsons have hired a new attorney, who says the reports don't tell the whole story. The claim is under the jurisdiction of a "condemnation commission" appointed by the Carver County court.

Meanwhile, having witnessed the experience of the Nelsons and two other homeowners who have filed damage claims over the project, Roden had strong words for the Met Council at its "customer forum" last week.

"The bottom line is, your processes appear broken, you do not have good contractor oversight, you have an ineffective method for constituent complaint resolution and repeated problems with odor control, re-planting and many related issues," Roden said.

The "odor control" referred to how the neighborhood stank after the new sewer's "biofilter odor control unit" malfunctioned May 28. It was in the process of being reconstructed last week, Kollodge said.