By Trevor Greenway
Wendy Stephens’ business is caught between a snowbank and a hard place.
The owner of End of the Line in Wakefield said she’s been pleading with the municipality for months for help to clear snow from the side of her business – snow from the road and from her roof that, in early February, was inching up over her windows.
“My windows are about to break,” said Stephens, Feb. 5, showing the Low Down how high the snow had come up – just below the window frames and her front side window and about a foot past the back window frames, ice pressing against the glass.
“I have to paint the side of my building every year,” she added about damage she said is caused by municipal plowing to her building. “I lost my banister from this balcony, which was crushed. And God knows if it’s shifting the building.”
According to Stephens, she started having problems in 2015 after the municipality removed a ditch beside her building, added a culvert and then filled it in. Without the extra space for snow, what snow that slides off her roof and snow from the road is piling up against her building.
The municipality said it won’t help.
When asked why the municipality won’t clear the snow from the side of her building, La Pêche Mayor Guillaume Lamoureux shot back: “You mean the snow on her property? That’s the answer, it’s private property.”
According to Lamoureux, much of the snow that piles up against Stephen’s building is coming from her own roof, and because the building is so close to the right-of-way, the snow ends up on the road and municipal plows push it back onto her property.
Lamoureux said the municipality “tolerates” the fact that the snow from her roof ends on the road, and they “don’t make a fuss” when plowing Wakefield’s main drag, Chemin Riverside.
“It is true that the municipality does not plow any private property, be it citizens, businesses, churches – we do not do that,” said Lamoureux. “Her building is pretty much encroaching on the right-of-way on the road. When we plow roads, depending on where we are, the snow may be pushed onto private property, but that’s just how it is.”
He added that if the municipality made an exception for Stephen’s then “it would never end” with regard to others.
Lamoureux said Stephens was sent a formal letter in September alerting her that the municipality would not remove the snow from the side of her building through the 2023-2024 winter season.
While Stephens said she’s aware of the private property issue, she just wants a solution so that she can continue running her business without worrying about her building being damaged. She said the municipality came once or twice a year in the past to remove the snow, but that stopped last year. She said she had volunteers – some in their 70s – who came out last winter to help her remove the giant snowbank. This year, she had to hire a private contractor for $100 an hour to remove the snow and dump it on her property at home.
She said the dirty snow piled against her building is bad for business.
“People think my business is closed,” said Stephens. “It’s hard enough as it is to run a small business these days.”
Part of her issue, she explained, is that after sending several emails to her local councillor, Claude Giroux, technical staff and the mayor, nobody from the municipality ever came to visit her at the shop to see how bad the situation was.
“I drive by there often,” said Wakefield Coun. Giroux. “I don’t have to go inside, I can see it from the road. I understand her dilemma, and so I asked if there was a way we could put the snow somewhere else, and they [the municipality is] looking into that.”
Snow removal costs jumped close to 30 per cent this year in La Pêche, and this year’s budget came in with its highest tax increase in the last five years – at 8.6 per cent.
“We cannot use public funds to pay for work on a private property,” added Lamoureux. “We should not have done so in previous years either.”