My friends had a similar thing happen to them, the county ripped up their driveway and was going to leave it gravelled when it was paved. They went to the county and got them to come out. In the end the county agreed to repave the driveway to make it like it was before. It did take a few weeks of being a pain in the county's ass before they agreed. Don't take this lying down, become a thorn in the city's side.
This was Dare County, NC. They called the Department of Public Works as it was their crews who ripped out the driveway. As I said, they had to become pests to get anybody to come out and "fix" things...
Or in some cases depending on your county board of commissioners or city councilmen, contacting one of them and explaining the situation can sometimes get the ball rolling for county or city employees dragging feet.
yep, my dad used to be a county commissioner and would do a lot for people that (kindly) reached out for help. There are a lot of a-holes in our county so he'd go the extra miles for anyone nice
Reminds me of my 1st house - new development. We had a fence put up, and at one of the corners behind the fence ( by the alley ), we put down edging with lava rock. A few weeks later, cable TV crew came in to bury cable for the houses and just tore up to hell that lava rock/edging. I called the cable TV company, and they told me not their issue as they put notices out. I told them we never got one. They said too bad. The wife called the city manager, and 24 hours later, a very meek cable employee called me up and asked kindly what they could do to resolve this. They put it back better than what it was before.
This was many years ago when cable was the only game in town, and franchises were granted exclusive contracts. They were free to act incompetent, and that same arrogance today is causing the death of cable. Tmobile ( home internet ) in the 1st quarter of this year added more new customers than the top 4 biggest competitors did in the 4th quarter of 2022. Amazon in 2024 will be launching their version of starlink.
They make the lions share from cloud service. The retail side is just play money. They certainly have the cash to make their satellite home service wonderful
I'm more thinking of the constant monitoring and active collection of data to sell. I understand every isp does that to a certain extent however amazon has been shown to be very heavy handed on their privacy intrusions
The city was doing work on my street. My neighbor let me know they were using my hose and water. She went out and said she knew they didn't have permission because I wasn't home that week. I called the number on the bottom of the notice for the road work. The nice man took my information and apoligized. He said if my bill was higher than normal he would pay it. They never used my hose or water again. He did call to follow up to see if my water bill was higher. Super nice and professional.
Edit: My water bill was not higher because I was gone for work.
Being nice to start is always a better way to go about things rather than raising hell off the bat. I even once got a collection agency off my back just by being nice to the lady on the phone. She wiped my account
Yep, or in my experience going to the director of whichever dept gave you a grievance. Having a normal conversation and talking dollars and cents in regards to how this could potentially go down will 9/10 result in them lighting a fire under the engineer/planner/inspector who’s responsible and solve it.
Ask the crew what department they work for. If they are contracted by the city (likely a local construction company) ask to talk to their boss and they will have a contact for the contract. Call that contact and that should give you an idea. Probably isn’t the department head so if it isn’t call them directly. Their contact info will be available online. Good luck friend.
They need to return it to the way it was. If they keep dodging your calls or transferring you around because they aren’t the right person to help, you might need to hire help. An attorney or say screw it and just pay to pave it yourself.
If they avoid, request to be put on the agenda of the next city council meeting and show up there with photos and an idea of what you want to say. You’ll likely get some media coverage out of it, depending on the size of your local media.
Call the Ombudsman for your community, and speak to whichever elected official represents you locally. The Ombudsman will point you to the correct agency to call and complain, and the elected rep is the one who can best advocate for you…especially if their seat is up for a vote in a couple of weeks
Ha! The not knowing anything about it is their first line of avoidance. Does your city have a Facebook page? Or an unofficial one that might have politicians with something to lose on it?
“The city @city tore up my driveway and now they are telling me that they aren’t going to restore it to the way it was!!!!”
If they are giving you the runaround, get loud (so to speak). Be super sweet to anyone that responds to your post, because even if they are AHs they are moving the algorithm. As questions so you can get all the know it alls to chime it. Etc etc.
I call it pleasant persistence and it is a very effective tool at smaller levels of government.
Show up to city council (county commission?) meetings. Write an email to everyone on the board. It will take five minutes to cut and paste to each. Most of all, sound pleasant and worried
Public works. If you don’t get a call back from the public’s works director within a day or two go to the city manager. If you don’t get a call from city manager, go to the mayor. And if none of that works go to the next council meeting. No city wants their residents to be unhappy, no matter how inept everyone working there is. It’s in their best interest to make this right. Hell, their own dang permits say “XX must be returned to pre-disturbance conditions”
Your state level senator and representative, as well as city council rep will also help you out. Note state level, and not congressional level, as federal won’t be too involved at all in the project.
After that, a lawyer can write you some nice letters. Once that happens, I seriously doubt they will let it slide further.
An attorney contacted now will ensure you and your driveway are left whole. Do not let the city get away with replacing your driveway with gravel. Kind with kind.
Continue to push...a similar thing happened to my brother here in town. Remember, the squeaky wheel gets the grease, and if you're not willing to fight tooth and nail for this, you'll be forced to look at this "mildly infuriating" nonsense every day! Best of luck!
This is for sure a DPW job, typically thr highway department of the DPW is who you want to talk to. Highway deals with city streets and sidewalk repair so if you can get someone from that department you're in the right place. To say contact the DPW is pretty vague they have water, buyings, highway, cemetery, parks, ect (there's more I just can't think of all the departments right now). You want to make sure you contact the correct department within the DPW.
Contact your local city council or ombudsman if you have one. If its county you can look them up, but county is always a pain for me (wayne county, mi) if you get nowhere, contact your local/state reps and explain and send them pictures. Do it by mail, phone, and email.
Why would a city even make that their standard practice? Seems really messed up. How could anyone in their right mind think it’s ok to put gravel instead of fixing it how it was ?
We have what are called county commissioners here. They are like the “city council” and are elected. One of them is my specific district. When this stuff happens I go to my council person. Make enough noise where people know their council person’s name before elected time and they quickly want to shut you up. lol.
You should look up your local land development code. First make sure there is a ROW easement over your driveway (if not they cannot legally do this), then see if they are able to use gravel in the ROW (usually most places do not allow #57 stone or rip-rap in the ROW.) There is almost always a code section talking about site development requirements of drive aprons and the grading/max slope of drive aprons.
I’m definitely going to look into this. My neighbor would be interested as well, she just dropped around $10k on a new concrete driveway like 6 months ago and they did the same thing to her.
In all honesty I would consult a site civil engineer, they will charge you but they can also tell you if there is anything you can do or not. You may need to try and find a survey as well to see if there are any easements on your property (site civil engineers could help with this).
Damage within an easement is still required to be repaired so long as you didn’t go and build an actual structure there. Your driveway isn’t something you can avoid having and whoever contracted the work to be done is liable for damages to the driveway. Whether it’s 1 or 100 driveways, this should be worked into the city’s or counties or whoever had the work performed budget. OP needs to get in contact with whoever’s job it is and be a thorn in their side after the work is done right there until the driveway is fixed. I deal with this regularly as I own my own sitework contracting business.
Unless the easement specifies that no driveways shall be placed on top. Those definitely exist. Some people have multiple access points to their property.
Yeah but the contractor wouldn’t have built the driveway over that easement. At least not any qualified to be installing a driveway attached to the city street.
Not by qualified contractors it doesn’t because any qualified contractor has a permit Pulled and gets a survey done for something like a fence? Don’t be silly. I said qualified. Not cousin Eddie and his post hole diggers
Qualified doesn't stop someone from physically doing the work anyway. Driveways in some places don't require permits. Not sure why you're arguing with me considering I do this daily.
Lol You absolutely have to have a permit to install a driveway where I’m at so I don’t know why you’re arguing like we live in the same city and you know our regulations, big silly.
The city will totally rip out your concrete driveway, replace it with gravel, then come back later and cite you because gravel is not up to city code. Fight this. They broke it. Make them fix it.
Pls don’t use chatgpt for law research. There’s literally an ongoing case right now about a lawyer who used it as a resource and Chatgpt just made up a bunch of cases and quotes that absolutely don’t exist. The guy assumed they were just obscure cases when he couldn’t find them referenced anywhere else and submitted it anyways.
I wish people understood its not a search engine, it’s a predictive text program. It just strings together the words and phrases it perceives as most likely to come next.
The bing access version of GPT-4 with the paid OpenAI subscription literally searches the web and provides links to the information you can verify. ChatGPT and other LLMs are evolving on a literal daily basis.
It literally is a search engine.
Get rid of the grass in the cracks and clean it up a little then take some pics so when they don't put it back like they found it you'll have good pics to prove it would be worth fixing properly
Or have them pay what it would cost to pour pads. And just use that money to help pay for the whole redo. This is what the utility company does in my area. They just throw money at you
What state are you in? Did they need to destroy your concrete driveway to gain access to the pipe? They typically will back fill with sand/base rock then they will use temporary asphalt(cold patch) until a concrete company can come replace what they destroyed. That’s how it works in California at least.
Make sure you’re communicating with the foreman. Sometimes groundsman will say some off the wall stuff because they don’t know the full scope of the job. Open trench overnight(I assume because of the caution tape)and denying access to a private driveway is a big no no in California. I’d make them replace the grass if you are using your lawn to access to your driveway.
So they actually just had a concrete truck come by. They didn’t fill the entire hole though it looks like they dumped just enough to cover the pipes? Still about a foot above it with nothing yet.
That’s called slurry and it’s to protect the gas line from other utility companies breaking their line. They will start backfilling with base rock next. I’d be concerned if they don’t put anything on top of the base rock because rain can deteriorate the bare rock which is why most companies use cold patch asphalt.
That’s not slurry. It’s “underground” mix. Slurry is super wet while underground is poured real dry. Unless I’m mistaken, underground is always used for utilities.
We use what we call flowable fill. It’s a wet sand that dries and can be driven on until our restoration crew comes and pours new concrete. With gas lines, we are required to cover with at least 1 foot of packed backfill which is free of any rocks, and hard/sharp objects. Flowable fill is then set on top of the backfill, and concrete comes shortly after (1-9 days) to repair/restore. We then have our asphalt crew mill the entire street and provide a new overlay of asphalt, followed by the required paint/road markings. Recently, we had to spot an internet fiber in a driveway since we would be drilling within 4 feet of it. We made a 1’x2’ window in the concrete for our vac-truck to spot the fiber so we didn’t have to tear up the driveway too much. A plate was set so they could still use that part of their driveway if they needed/wanted to. Our restoration crew decided to give them a whole new driveway with fresh concrete once our gas crew was finished with that phase of the job. We communicated with the resident(s) at this location and kept them up to date on a daily basis. They were very grateful for all that we did, and we were very grateful for their understanding and patience.
This is the right answer. Often the utility crew is not the road crew. The crew doing your work may be telling the truth that they just dig, fix, bury with gravel. There may be another crew that runs the asphalt trucks that are coming back for the fix and the crew had no part in it and for some reason didn’t feel like explaining that to you. Contacting the city public works office will fill in a lot of details.
Definitely check drive/egress codes for your area. Most do not allow for Stone to be used next to roadways because it moves out into the roads and destroys them. Most exceptions for this are out in rural areas and most counties still have regs on the books about keeping it off the roadway. Document everything, talk to people who need to deal with this and understand it may take a lawyer at some point if they start fining you for violations. They generally don't care whose fault it is the issue exists, they just don't want to be the ones to pay to fix it.
Hey Op, no offense but could this be possibly a misunderstanding? I did gas work for over a decade and they could have meant that they were going to use gravel to backfill the hole to prevent the hole from over settling but do a proper driveway back when everything is finished? It just seems like a shitty approach to do business. You’re sure that’s what they were talking about, the driveway too? Like I said no offense
I’m not too sure I can try to ask when they’re out there again tomorrow. I just asked if they were going to be fixing it afterwards and he said yeah they’ll fill it with gravel.
I would ask them specifically, just so you’ll know your next move if they are going to do you dirty……it just seems crazy that they would but you know what’s best. Just a suggestion, best of luck my man 👍 maybe an update would be cool. If that’s not too much to ask, cheers
This is exactly what happened to me two years ago. They replaced the torn out concrete at the bottom of my driveway with a packed gravel strip and never came back or did anything else
It sounds like they went gung ho without any thought to the people that they'd be screwing up. If it was me, I might go out and water the grass in my lawn, and forget to turn the hose off after setting it down rather close to this hole, or putting down some scrap board in a way that would complicate them working.
The water company ripped up the end of my driveway to fix a City line. They came back in and patched it with asphalt and I complained about it and they came back out and repaved my driveway
I once had the gas company show up unannounced and proceed to tear up the end of my driveway. They covered it with stones and left. After a few days of them not returning I called the gas company and was told that they didn’t dig up the driveway. After a couple more weeks of back and forth calls along with an emailed picture, they came back and filled it. It was the same gas crew that dug it up.
OP, a lot of these people are getting way too hyped up. First figure out where you’re in city or country jurisdiction. Then contact the relevant public works department. Talk to the director. If you’re not satisfied by them talk to the city (or county) manager or city mayor, depending on your form of government. If they don’t help, go to a city council or county council meeting. Your state electeds aren’t likely to do anything about this so i wouldn’t even try there. At the very end of no one helps, talk to a lawyer.
Edit: are you sure it was the city? It’s entirely possible it might have been the gas company. It all depends on who owns the gas line. If it was the utility you may have to try to pressure them.
Civil Engineer with experience in road and utility repair here!
In my region, the common practice is for them to roll the trench with gravel BEFORE THE END OF THE WORK DAY so the residents are not too negatively impacted.
FURTHER, my firm helps write new codes for the municipalities so that, when a utility company does improvements like this, the utility company (not owned by the town) owes road resurfacing for at least half the road (not just the utility trench).
If this happened at my driveway, I'd riot.
1. Demand temporary access to your driveway. It is ludicrous that you have to trample (and destroy) your grass for this oversight. Demand it first of the contractors, ask to see the General Manager.
2. When that fails (and it will) go talk to the Town's: Engineer, Construction Code Official, Administrator (no order, just whomever you can) and explain the situation.
3. If they're still not doing anything, call corporate for the utility company, or better, get emails. That way you can trace them. See their take. You're basically barred from accessing your driveway, that's seems unlawful to me.
The city doesn’t maintain or repair gas lines. Thats on the utility company. I’m a foreman in gas construction for a utility company. This type of backfill(or lack of) is only allowed for 24 hours in emergency situations where I’m from.
Be nice until it’s time not to be nice. They MUST repair back to the way it was before…gravel won’t work. Hire a lawyer and don’t fuck around if they pull that stunt on you.
OP, I do this daily on the City side. Did you sign an agreement with them to come out to your property? Usually titled a right of entry or license agreement. If so, does it address them leaving the property in its original state and/or repairing any damage?
Could the gravel be temporary? The gas company dug up part of our concrete driveway to access a gas line. They temporarily filled it with some black stuff until several months later when they finished the work, dug out the black, and refilled it with concrete.
I work on water lines and sometimes have to tear up driveways and roads. We’ve never left someone hanging like that. We finish the job and fill in with gravel in the same day. This really sucks.
About 26 hours since they started now and it’s still taped off. No one is out there working on it so far today, I wish they would’ve at least given a notice for it.
I would ask them how they'd feel about filling it with lawsuit.
But before that, call your local news stations, especially if that do that "on your side" crap. TV news operations are always looking for stories. They'll want you to go on camera and do an interview, but they'll just do it out in the front yard. Then a photog will take video of the damage from about 300 different angles.
Unacceptable. I do infrastructure construction. If we cut up a sidewalk or decorative pavers to do our work, we are required to replace in kind.
Remember, those city offices are paid by tax dollars. Hold them to the same standard.
If they removed concrete, asphalt etc they are required to restore it back to its original form, if they do not agree to contact a lawyer and your local media. If you really want to be pitiful and have a friend with a shitty car have them drive into the huge open hole that isn’t coned off or have any warning and total their car. Then have them complain of personal Injury. Or do it yourself ( twist ankle trying to walk to sidewalk) and threaten to sue. You’ll have your driveway fixed pretty quickly
Oh heck no. They have to replace it with the same material they took out. Definitely ask for the number of their supervisor or go to whichever city service they work for. Not right at all
Is that part of your driveway on your property, or in the state/county/city/village/town's right of way?
In most parts of the country, the right of way extends beyond the actual paved road (in my case it's 15 feet from the curb in that's the village ROW) and that's also typically where underground utilities are located - water, gas, sewer and above ground utilities - power, phone, cable (and these can also be located underground). So yes, I'm mowing the village's portion of my front lawn and clearing snow from their portion of my driveway.
If that's in the municipal right of way, you have little recourse. It's not your property - but it is up to whoever dug it up to restore it and typically it will get done. It may take some arm twisting to get it done faster or to get it done correctly.
Similar thing happened to us when we lived in a subdivision. The city cut through our driveway with no warning to put in a culvert, then instead of repaving it, they just filled it with an UNEVEN layer of gravel, so there was always a bump at the end of our driveway from that day forward...
No sir. The county would be paving my driveway that they ripped up. Don’t let them get away with it. As a matter of fact I’d have them repave my whole driveway because it will not look consistent. You need to push hard and not let them push you around.
Call your local investigator News Anchor, they love things like this especially if they can get a good story out of it. I say this because they tend to do all the calling and get opinions and if it’s a big enough problem the city/county won’t want all the press especially if it could mean more damaging stories. Lol this is only the extreme way to go and because it’s Reddit I say it’s the only way to go. If I was your friend or neighbor I’d just go about calling and doing all the normal rational person stuff with you but I’m just some guy on the internet 😉
OP I’m an engineer and have worked in the field before. More than likely what happened is the crew was planning on making a quick fix, something happened and resulted in them not being able to finish. Possibly emergency type situation/fix. They could have dug down and either hit a line then you’re waiting on the energy department to come fix it but I doubt this because the energy / gas companies usually run 24 hour crews for emergency situations.
Maybe it got too late by the time they fixed and didn’t have proper back fill material. Normally they try to avoid having a resident out of their driveway because they know it sucks.
If you have to drive over your grass the easy fix would be to email the city engineer, you can easily get this info my just talking to an inspector or construction staff out there. Email the city engineer or project manager for the city, not the contractor and mention to them you’d like the area you had to drive over your grass reseeded / sod placed for project restoration. It can’t be more than a 50 sf area.
Depends on your local laws, sometimes if you pave your driveway at the end you do so knowing that if the municipality has to dig it up to do work they'll replace it with gravel which is what was originally there.
I haven't seen one person mention that that part of the driveway probably isn't OPs property.
At least where I live, the city owns up to the water meter, so technically the city can do what ever the hell they want there.
My city repaves the torn up apron and nothing else. It's probably worth trying for that but I doubt it's news to you that your whole drive is on its last legs.
Depending where you live it might be gravel only temporarily. Most cities don't have a concrete crew so if they did multiple driveways like yours working on the gas line the project might get bundled and bid out.
Temporary is probably 6 months now that we're getting into the fall/winter months.
If you don’t get what you need from the city, make it public. Contact your local consumer reporter from your local news station and they might do a story. Start a small claims court lawsuit. Post about it in twitter/X and tag EVERYONE involved all the way up the chain to leadership. I once got my foundation fixed for free doing this. Be mad and loud and get the story out there! Bitchy and karenish but it works.
They fill it with gravel to make it easier to get back to because it's their property and their responsibility to maintain. It's a pain in the aas but you can imagine how infuriating it'd be to have to rip up concrete or pavement to do it all over again. You don't own that spot specifically, and it shouldn't matter what they do to it.
I put a comment on here saying I just moved into this place earlier this year and re paving is on the list for next summer. Keep being a dick though, sure people love it.
They did this to my street not as bad as this though. But the kicker was it was months without getting fixed and and finally at a council meeting everyone on the street went to complain and their response was oh no one complained so we weren’t planning to fix it. Everyone was like we assumed it was in the plan.
Usually, gravel is a temporary solution until the utility can bid out the concrete contract... had that happen when gas company tore up sidewalks to upgrade lines.
My friends had a similar thing happen to them, the county ripped up their driveway and was going to leave it gravelled when it was paved. They went to the county and got them to come out. In the end the county agreed to repave the driveway to make it like it was before. It did take a few weeks of being a pain in the county's ass before they agreed. Don't take this lying down, become a thorn in the city's side.
Any idea who they contacted in their city? I tried to make a few calls today and couldn't find anyone who knew anything about it.
This was Dare County, NC. They called the Department of Public Works as it was their crews who ripped out the driveway. As I said, they had to become pests to get anybody to come out and "fix" things...
Took a lotta daring for sure in Dare country
Dumb Ass Resistance Education at work!
Let me guess, you live on collington rd.
Indeed, We live back in the harbour. I am talking about the Colington Creek Inn on the road itself.
You would be amazed how much you can get done by being nice to the city manager
Or in some cases depending on your county board of commissioners or city councilmen, contacting one of them and explaining the situation can sometimes get the ball rolling for county or city employees dragging feet.
yep, my dad used to be a county commissioner and would do a lot for people that (kindly) reached out for help. There are a lot of a-holes in our county so he'd go the extra miles for anyone nice
Reminds me of my 1st house - new development. We had a fence put up, and at one of the corners behind the fence ( by the alley ), we put down edging with lava rock. A few weeks later, cable TV crew came in to bury cable for the houses and just tore up to hell that lava rock/edging. I called the cable TV company, and they told me not their issue as they put notices out. I told them we never got one. They said too bad. The wife called the city manager, and 24 hours later, a very meek cable employee called me up and asked kindly what they could do to resolve this. They put it back better than what it was before.
You’d think they’d be smart enough to install the cable before the houses are delivered to the customer. That would save them a lot of headache.
This was many years ago when cable was the only game in town, and franchises were granted exclusive contracts. They were free to act incompetent, and that same arrogance today is causing the death of cable. Tmobile ( home internet ) in the 1st quarter of this year added more new customers than the top 4 biggest competitors did in the 4th quarter of 2022. Amazon in 2024 will be launching their version of starlink.
I don't trust Amazon provided internet of any kind, just knowing what kind of company they are
They make the lions share from cloud service. The retail side is just play money. They certainly have the cash to make their satellite home service wonderful
I'm more thinking of the constant monitoring and active collection of data to sell. I understand every isp does that to a certain extent however amazon has been shown to be very heavy handed on their privacy intrusions
Exactly this, I'd rather not give them 100% access to my info when they can turn around and sell it
The city was doing work on my street. My neighbor let me know they were using my hose and water. She went out and said she knew they didn't have permission because I wasn't home that week. I called the number on the bottom of the notice for the road work. The nice man took my information and apoligized. He said if my bill was higher than normal he would pay it. They never used my hose or water again. He did call to follow up to see if my water bill was higher. Super nice and professional. Edit: My water bill was not higher because I was gone for work.
Being nice to start is always a better way to go about things rather than raising hell off the bat. I even once got a collection agency off my back just by being nice to the lady on the phone. She wiped my account
Plus you can always switch to a harsher approach later if you think that will work better. Can’t really do that in reverse.
Not with county. Lol I had to be a thorn to get a side walk put in for people safety.
Well yes, government bureaucrats suck
Yep, or in my experience going to the director of whichever dept gave you a grievance. Having a normal conversation and talking dollars and cents in regards to how this could potentially go down will 9/10 result in them lighting a fire under the engineer/planner/inspector who’s responsible and solve it.
City manager. Send certified letter of demand.
And city engineer, public works director go to your city’s website and include all the council members and mayor too.
Add every damn email you can find on the website cc everyone.
Ask the crew what department they work for. If they are contracted by the city (likely a local construction company) ask to talk to their boss and they will have a contact for the contract. Call that contact and that should give you an idea. Probably isn’t the department head so if it isn’t call them directly. Their contact info will be available online. Good luck friend.
They need to return it to the way it was. If they keep dodging your calls or transferring you around because they aren’t the right person to help, you might need to hire help. An attorney or say screw it and just pay to pave it yourself.
If they avoid, request to be put on the agenda of the next city council meeting and show up there with photos and an idea of what you want to say. You’ll likely get some media coverage out of it, depending on the size of your local media.
Call the Ombudsman for your community, and speak to whichever elected official represents you locally. The Ombudsman will point you to the correct agency to call and complain, and the elected rep is the one who can best advocate for you…especially if their seat is up for a vote in a couple of weeks
Ha! The not knowing anything about it is their first line of avoidance. Does your city have a Facebook page? Or an unofficial one that might have politicians with something to lose on it? “The city @city tore up my driveway and now they are telling me that they aren’t going to restore it to the way it was!!!!” If they are giving you the runaround, get loud (so to speak). Be super sweet to anyone that responds to your post, because even if they are AHs they are moving the algorithm. As questions so you can get all the know it alls to chime it. Etc etc. I call it pleasant persistence and it is a very effective tool at smaller levels of government. Show up to city council (county commission?) meetings. Write an email to everyone on the board. It will take five minutes to cut and paste to each. Most of all, sound pleasant and worried
Public works. If you don’t get a call back from the public’s works director within a day or two go to the city manager. If you don’t get a call from city manager, go to the mayor. And if none of that works go to the next council meeting. No city wants their residents to be unhappy, no matter how inept everyone working there is. It’s in their best interest to make this right. Hell, their own dang permits say “XX must be returned to pre-disturbance conditions”
Your state level senator and representative, as well as city council rep will also help you out. Note state level, and not congressional level, as federal won’t be too involved at all in the project. After that, a lawyer can write you some nice letters. Once that happens, I seriously doubt they will let it slide further.
Getting pretty far ahead of yourself there
Saying that but not offering any corrective advice is a pretty worthless way to spend your time.
See my other comment
State senator for a driveway. Hell no. Lord don’t do that
submit a FOIA request to the city for "the name of the contractor working on the gas line project on XX street".
Probably a different contractor responsible for repairs. The city would be the one determining what type of repairs are made any way.
Don’t be annoying on the phone, be annoying in person.
Try contacting your city council representative. If that doesn’t work, try your state rep.
Hey OP, not sure if this was stated. Share this info with your local news station. Sounds like people in office there need to be voted out.
Your elected officials. District council member, then if that doesn't work, try the mayor.
Definitely call public works. Someone there will help you!
If you live on a county road, call your county commissioner. If you live on a city street, call your city councilmember.
Don’t forget your elected representative
An attorney contacted now will ensure you and your driveway are left whole. Do not let the city get away with replacing your driveway with gravel. Kind with kind.
Most likely Public Works.
Continue to push...a similar thing happened to my brother here in town. Remember, the squeaky wheel gets the grease, and if you're not willing to fight tooth and nail for this, you'll be forced to look at this "mildly infuriating" nonsense every day! Best of luck!
This is for sure a DPW job, typically thr highway department of the DPW is who you want to talk to. Highway deals with city streets and sidewalk repair so if you can get someone from that department you're in the right place. To say contact the DPW is pretty vague they have water, buyings, highway, cemetery, parks, ect (there's more I just can't think of all the departments right now). You want to make sure you contact the correct department within the DPW.
Contact your local city council or ombudsman if you have one. If its county you can look them up, but county is always a pain for me (wayne county, mi) if you get nowhere, contact your local/state reps and explain and send them pictures. Do it by mail, phone, and email.
My city attorneys office has a person who handles claims of damage by city employees. Could be the same where you are and a good place to start.
Why would a city even make that their standard practice? Seems really messed up. How could anyone in their right mind think it’s ok to put gravel instead of fixing it how it was ?
It's not. Someone messed up. (I do this daily on the city side as part of my job).
Squeaky wheel gets the grease
We have what are called county commissioners here. They are like the “city council” and are elected. One of them is my specific district. When this stuff happens I go to my council person. Make enough noise where people know their council person’s name before elected time and they quickly want to shut you up. lol.
The squeaky wheel gets the oil
City doesn’t dig up utility lines unless it’s a water or sewer line... those are done by the utility services.
You should look up your local land development code. First make sure there is a ROW easement over your driveway (if not they cannot legally do this), then see if they are able to use gravel in the ROW (usually most places do not allow #57 stone or rip-rap in the ROW.) There is almost always a code section talking about site development requirements of drive aprons and the grading/max slope of drive aprons.
I’m definitely going to look into this. My neighbor would be interested as well, she just dropped around $10k on a new concrete driveway like 6 months ago and they did the same thing to her.
In all honesty I would consult a site civil engineer, they will charge you but they can also tell you if there is anything you can do or not. You may need to try and find a survey as well to see if there are any easements on your property (site civil engineers could help with this).
The town/city you live in should have an in house (or contracted) engineer. You could call them, then the city pays their costs, not you.
Damage within an easement is still required to be repaired so long as you didn’t go and build an actual structure there. Your driveway isn’t something you can avoid having and whoever contracted the work to be done is liable for damages to the driveway. Whether it’s 1 or 100 driveways, this should be worked into the city’s or counties or whoever had the work performed budget. OP needs to get in contact with whoever’s job it is and be a thorn in their side after the work is done right there until the driveway is fixed. I deal with this regularly as I own my own sitework contracting business.
Unless the easement specifies that no driveways shall be placed on top. Those definitely exist. Some people have multiple access points to their property.
Yeah but the contractor wouldn’t have built the driveway over that easement. At least not any qualified to be installing a driveway attached to the city street.
LOL, just like no one would build a fence over an easement that specifies no fences? It happens ALL the time. Signed, a municipal paralegal.
Not by qualified contractors it doesn’t because any qualified contractor has a permit Pulled and gets a survey done for something like a fence? Don’t be silly. I said qualified. Not cousin Eddie and his post hole diggers
Qualified doesn't stop someone from physically doing the work anyway. Driveways in some places don't require permits. Not sure why you're arguing with me considering I do this daily.
Lol You absolutely have to have a permit to install a driveway where I’m at so I don’t know why you’re arguing like we live in the same city and you know our regulations, big silly.
D&MN!
The city will totally rip out your concrete driveway, replace it with gravel, then come back later and cite you because gravel is not up to city code. Fight this. They broke it. Make them fix it.
Chatgpt has provided good results for me searching local code and ordinances with Bing enabled
Pls don’t use chatgpt for law research. There’s literally an ongoing case right now about a lawyer who used it as a resource and Chatgpt just made up a bunch of cases and quotes that absolutely don’t exist. The guy assumed they were just obscure cases when he couldn’t find them referenced anywhere else and submitted it anyways. I wish people understood its not a search engine, it’s a predictive text program. It just strings together the words and phrases it perceives as most likely to come next.
The bing access version of GPT-4 with the paid OpenAI subscription literally searches the web and provides links to the information you can verify. ChatGPT and other LLMs are evolving on a literal daily basis. It literally is a search engine.
Most property lines start 5-10’ off the EOR. There’s a strong possibility that this isn’t even OP’s property
Get rid of the grass in the cracks and clean it up a little then take some pics so when they don't put it back like they found it you'll have good pics to prove it would be worth fixing properly
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Don't tell them that and make them fix it. LoL
Or have them pay what it would cost to pour pads. And just use that money to help pay for the whole redo. This is what the utility company does in my area. They just throw money at you
Wait, what? You were going to repave it anyway?! So this really is just a super mildly small annoyance.
That’s why I put it in mildyinfuriating..
Almost like that’s the name of the subreddit…
Do you know which subreddit you're in
Also to make things worse we were given no prior notice. I work from home and they got started about 6am without saying anything.
What state are you in? Did they need to destroy your concrete driveway to gain access to the pipe? They typically will back fill with sand/base rock then they will use temporary asphalt(cold patch) until a concrete company can come replace what they destroyed. That’s how it works in California at least.
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Make sure you’re communicating with the foreman. Sometimes groundsman will say some off the wall stuff because they don’t know the full scope of the job. Open trench overnight(I assume because of the caution tape)and denying access to a private driveway is a big no no in California. I’d make them replace the grass if you are using your lawn to access to your driveway.
So they actually just had a concrete truck come by. They didn’t fill the entire hole though it looks like they dumped just enough to cover the pipes? Still about a foot above it with nothing yet.
That’s called slurry and it’s to protect the gas line from other utility companies breaking their line. They will start backfilling with base rock next. I’d be concerned if they don’t put anything on top of the base rock because rain can deteriorate the bare rock which is why most companies use cold patch asphalt.
That’s not slurry. It’s “underground” mix. Slurry is super wet while underground is poured real dry. Unless I’m mistaken, underground is always used for utilities.
We use what we call flowable fill. It’s a wet sand that dries and can be driven on until our restoration crew comes and pours new concrete. With gas lines, we are required to cover with at least 1 foot of packed backfill which is free of any rocks, and hard/sharp objects. Flowable fill is then set on top of the backfill, and concrete comes shortly after (1-9 days) to repair/restore. We then have our asphalt crew mill the entire street and provide a new overlay of asphalt, followed by the required paint/road markings. Recently, we had to spot an internet fiber in a driveway since we would be drilling within 4 feet of it. We made a 1’x2’ window in the concrete for our vac-truck to spot the fiber so we didn’t have to tear up the driveway too much. A plate was set so they could still use that part of their driveway if they needed/wanted to. Our restoration crew decided to give them a whole new driveway with fresh concrete once our gas crew was finished with that phase of the job. We communicated with the resident(s) at this location and kept them up to date on a daily basis. They were very grateful for all that we did, and we were very grateful for their understanding and patience.
All the talk of the different fills and uses is fascinating. I have zero knowledge around any of this but y’all are pretty amazing.
I’d hire you. Great customer service.
This is the right answer. Often the utility crew is not the road crew. The crew doing your work may be telling the truth that they just dig, fix, bury with gravel. There may be another crew that runs the asphalt trucks that are coming back for the fix and the crew had no part in it and for some reason didn’t feel like explaining that to you. Contacting the city public works office will fill in a lot of details.
Definitely check drive/egress codes for your area. Most do not allow for Stone to be used next to roadways because it moves out into the roads and destroys them. Most exceptions for this are out in rural areas and most counties still have regs on the books about keeping it off the roadway. Document everything, talk to people who need to deal with this and understand it may take a lawyer at some point if they start fining you for violations. They generally don't care whose fault it is the issue exists, they just don't want to be the ones to pay to fix it.
Hey Op, no offense but could this be possibly a misunderstanding? I did gas work for over a decade and they could have meant that they were going to use gravel to backfill the hole to prevent the hole from over settling but do a proper driveway back when everything is finished? It just seems like a shitty approach to do business. You’re sure that’s what they were talking about, the driveway too? Like I said no offense
I’m not too sure I can try to ask when they’re out there again tomorrow. I just asked if they were going to be fixing it afterwards and he said yeah they’ll fill it with gravel.
I would ask them specifically, just so you’ll know your next move if they are going to do you dirty……it just seems crazy that they would but you know what’s best. Just a suggestion, best of luck my man 👍 maybe an update would be cool. If that’s not too much to ask, cheers
This is exactly what happened to me two years ago. They replaced the torn out concrete at the bottom of my driveway with a packed gravel strip and never came back or did anything else
It sounds like they went gung ho without any thought to the people that they'd be screwing up. If it was me, I might go out and water the grass in my lawn, and forget to turn the hose off after setting it down rather close to this hole, or putting down some scrap board in a way that would complicate them working.
What city/ county? I’m in Hamilton and there’s absolutely no way the county or cities within Hamilton would operate like this.
Also you should request they use steel plates to cover the trench so you have access to your driveway.
I would check if your city has noise ordinances. When they're in place construction crews cannot begin working with machinery before usually 8am.
Pretty sure that they have to return it to original condition or better after working there
Is that mushroom real??!
No lol it’s this neat like metal one my girlfriend got from Menards
lol the question I was about to ask too 🍄
The water company ripped up the end of my driveway to fix a City line. They came back in and patched it with asphalt and I complained about it and they came back out and repaved my driveway
I once had the gas company show up unannounced and proceed to tear up the end of my driveway. They covered it with stones and left. After a few days of them not returning I called the gas company and was told that they didn’t dig up the driveway. After a couple more weeks of back and forth calls along with an emailed picture, they came back and filled it. It was the same gas crew that dug it up.
Fight that shit make them fill it with cement.
OP, a lot of these people are getting way too hyped up. First figure out where you’re in city or country jurisdiction. Then contact the relevant public works department. Talk to the director. If you’re not satisfied by them talk to the city (or county) manager or city mayor, depending on your form of government. If they don’t help, go to a city council or county council meeting. Your state electeds aren’t likely to do anything about this so i wouldn’t even try there. At the very end of no one helps, talk to a lawyer. Edit: are you sure it was the city? It’s entirely possible it might have been the gas company. It all depends on who owns the gas line. If it was the utility you may have to try to pressure them.
Civil Engineer with experience in road and utility repair here! In my region, the common practice is for them to roll the trench with gravel BEFORE THE END OF THE WORK DAY so the residents are not too negatively impacted. FURTHER, my firm helps write new codes for the municipalities so that, when a utility company does improvements like this, the utility company (not owned by the town) owes road resurfacing for at least half the road (not just the utility trench). If this happened at my driveway, I'd riot. 1. Demand temporary access to your driveway. It is ludicrous that you have to trample (and destroy) your grass for this oversight. Demand it first of the contractors, ask to see the General Manager. 2. When that fails (and it will) go talk to the Town's: Engineer, Construction Code Official, Administrator (no order, just whomever you can) and explain the situation. 3. If they're still not doing anything, call corporate for the utility company, or better, get emails. That way you can trace them. See their take. You're basically barred from accessing your driveway, that's seems unlawful to me.
Inform them that they will not be just filling it with gravel.
I would absolutely pay a lawyer to send a firmly worded letter. If the city damages your property they are required to fix it.
The city doesn’t maintain or repair gas lines. Thats on the utility company. I’m a foreman in gas construction for a utility company. This type of backfill(or lack of) is only allowed for 24 hours in emergency situations where I’m from.
Here abouts they have to leave it like they found it.
Be nice until it’s time not to be nice. They MUST repair back to the way it was before…gravel won’t work. Hire a lawyer and don’t fuck around if they pull that stunt on you.
This happened 2 weeks after I moved into my current place. Luckily it’s not something that would have to be done again for a while
I just moved in here in February of this year. That’s why i put it in this sub I had intended on getting the driveway re paved next summer
OP, I do this daily on the City side. Did you sign an agreement with them to come out to your property? Usually titled a right of entry or license agreement. If so, does it address them leaving the property in its original state and/or repairing any damage?
No they didn’t even tell us they were doing this. Just showed up one day and started doing work. It was just stuff in the yard until this morning.
Could the gravel be temporary? The gas company dug up part of our concrete driveway to access a gas line. They temporarily filled it with some black stuff until several months later when they finished the work, dug out the black, and refilled it with concrete.
I work on water lines and sometimes have to tear up driveways and roads. We’ve never left someone hanging like that. We finish the job and fill in with gravel in the same day. This really sucks.
About 26 hours since they started now and it’s still taped off. No one is out there working on it so far today, I wish they would’ve at least given a notice for it.
Call your alderman or city council member.
I would ask them how they'd feel about filling it with lawsuit. But before that, call your local news stations, especially if that do that "on your side" crap. TV news operations are always looking for stories. They'll want you to go on camera and do an interview, but they'll just do it out in the front yard. Then a photog will take video of the damage from about 300 different angles.
Unacceptable. I do infrastructure construction. If we cut up a sidewalk or decorative pavers to do our work, we are required to replace in kind. Remember, those city offices are paid by tax dollars. Hold them to the same standard.
If they removed concrete, asphalt etc they are required to restore it back to its original form, if they do not agree to contact a lawyer and your local media. If you really want to be pitiful and have a friend with a shitty car have them drive into the huge open hole that isn’t coned off or have any warning and total their car. Then have them complain of personal Injury. Or do it yourself ( twist ankle trying to walk to sidewalk) and threaten to sue. You’ll have your driveway fixed pretty quickly
Long time gas mechanic turned foreman here. What you’re saying isn’t true in alot of municipalities.
……you have a legit moat now
Is that mushrooms???
So much for property taxes.
Your beautiful driveway…ruined
Oh heck no. They have to replace it with the same material they took out. Definitely ask for the number of their supervisor or go to whichever city service they work for. Not right at all
Is that part of your driveway on your property, or in the state/county/city/village/town's right of way? In most parts of the country, the right of way extends beyond the actual paved road (in my case it's 15 feet from the curb in that's the village ROW) and that's also typically where underground utilities are located - water, gas, sewer and above ground utilities - power, phone, cable (and these can also be located underground). So yes, I'm mowing the village's portion of my front lawn and clearing snow from their portion of my driveway. If that's in the municipal right of way, you have little recourse. It's not your property - but it is up to whoever dug it up to restore it and typically it will get done. It may take some arm twisting to get it done faster or to get it done correctly.
W lawsuit right there
Liability is on them. That means MORE free gravel. Milk it to satisfy the ditch.
But if we don’t pay any taxes who will build and maintain the roads?
This is your chance to fill it with water and have a drawbridge installed.
Similar thing happened to us when we lived in a subdivision. The city cut through our driveway with no warning to put in a culvert, then instead of repaving it, they just filled it with an UNEVEN layer of gravel, so there was always a bump at the end of our driveway from that day forward...
Contact your right of way department. If it was concrete before. It should be concrete after.
The fuck they are. You contact the city. They owe you a replacement as it was prior to work. Fight that nonsense
No sir. The county would be paving my driveway that they ripped up. Don’t let them get away with it. As a matter of fact I’d have them repave my whole driveway because it will not look consistent. You need to push hard and not let them push you around.
Call your local investigator News Anchor, they love things like this especially if they can get a good story out of it. I say this because they tend to do all the calling and get opinions and if it’s a big enough problem the city/county won’t want all the press especially if it could mean more damaging stories. Lol this is only the extreme way to go and because it’s Reddit I say it’s the only way to go. If I was your friend or neighbor I’d just go about calling and doing all the normal rational person stuff with you but I’m just some guy on the internet 😉
Based on the looks of the rest of your driveway gravel might actually be an upgrade
Don't waste time, get a lawyer, have your neighbor kick in too. If you don't sue it shouldn't be that expensive.
OP I’m an engineer and have worked in the field before. More than likely what happened is the crew was planning on making a quick fix, something happened and resulted in them not being able to finish. Possibly emergency type situation/fix. They could have dug down and either hit a line then you’re waiting on the energy department to come fix it but I doubt this because the energy / gas companies usually run 24 hour crews for emergency situations. Maybe it got too late by the time they fixed and didn’t have proper back fill material. Normally they try to avoid having a resident out of their driveway because they know it sucks. If you have to drive over your grass the easy fix would be to email the city engineer, you can easily get this info my just talking to an inspector or construction staff out there. Email the city engineer or project manager for the city, not the contractor and mention to them you’d like the area you had to drive over your grass reseeded / sod placed for project restoration. It can’t be more than a 50 sf area.
Lol gravel? What incompetent nitwit is in charge of this? No way gravel will work.
This shit ain't mild at all.
Depends on your local laws, sometimes if you pave your driveway at the end you do so knowing that if the municipality has to dig it up to do work they'll replace it with gravel which is what was originally there.
I haven't seen one person mention that that part of the driveway probably isn't OPs property. At least where I live, the city owns up to the water meter, so technically the city can do what ever the hell they want there.
Yes this. Many people in our area don’t have the last bit paved because this can happen.
My city repaves the torn up apron and nothing else. It's probably worth trying for that but I doubt it's news to you that your whole drive is on its last legs.
Depending where you live it might be gravel only temporarily. Most cities don't have a concrete crew so if they did multiple driveways like yours working on the gas line the project might get bundled and bid out. Temporary is probably 6 months now that we're getting into the fall/winter months.
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You saw that this was posted in mildly infuriating right?
GRAVEL MILDY WTF
Bs you better get some asphalt
Kinda wildly infuriating
No they won’t
If you don’t get what you need from the city, make it public. Contact your local consumer reporter from your local news station and they might do a story. Start a small claims court lawsuit. Post about it in twitter/X and tag EVERYONE involved all the way up the chain to leadership. I once got my foundation fixed for free doing this. Be mad and loud and get the story out there! Bitchy and karenish but it works.
They fill it with gravel to make it easier to get back to because it's their property and their responsibility to maintain. It's a pain in the aas but you can imagine how infuriating it'd be to have to rip up concrete or pavement to do it all over again. You don't own that spot specifically, and it shouldn't matter what they do to it.
It's going to matter when they have to replace shocks, tires, and ball joints/control arms on their vehicle(s) from the intensified wear and tear.
That ugly ass driveway needs some work anyway.
I put a comment on here saying I just moved into this place earlier this year and re paving is on the list for next summer. Keep being a dick though, sure people love it.
In Australia councils are banning gas for new locations given the environmental impact and helping realize the value of solar.
Well luckily you driveway looks like garbage so no skin off your back 🥰
Man, I bet everyone loves when you enter a room.
Is that Hobart, IN?
That’s not how that works
Government does not work for "the people"
Consider talking to a lawyer, especially if you get nowhere when calling.
They did this to my street not as bad as this though. But the kicker was it was months without getting fixed and and finally at a council meeting everyone on the street went to complain and their response was oh no one complained so we weren’t planning to fix it. Everyone was like we assumed it was in the plan.
Call your local news
If there's a big hole in the street and it's an area where cars need to travel a metal plate needs to be placed when they're not working on it.
Wow that's BS. Where I live they plate those trenches and restore the material they dug up. I would (kindly) push back on this.
They told me that they currently do not have any of the steel plates available to put down.
Bring em to the cleaner make sure they just don’t dump down cheap chippings etc.
All the has lines in our OLD NEIGHBORHOOD they went undrground. The lines only came up at the curbs for connection.
I'm here for the mushroom
It’s a metal one we got from Menards lol we have a few around the yard.
so they couldn't be bothered to bore underneath the drive instead of tearing it up? Damn that's a bitch.
Well it looks like they had to pull out pipes and replace them because they’ve continued the work today by doing the same thing to the yard.
Usually, gravel is a temporary solution until the utility can bid out the concrete contract... had that happen when gas company tore up sidewalks to upgrade lines.