Re: retaining all/water issue - Laserfiche WebLink

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Mr. and Mrs. Edmunds BRS File No. : 11016684 Our File No. : MPS27645 April 17, 1997 The first relevant issue relates to whether or not the City had an obligation to you personally with respect to protecting your property from water running off the adjacent property. As a general rule, City inspectors are not representing individual property owners when they conduct their inspections. They are representing the general interests of the City of Orono. In this case, however, they did work with the adjacent property owner and the previous owner of your property to address any additional water runoff onto your property created by new construction on the adjacent property. The inspector was not representing the interests of either property owner while measures to handle runoff were being addressed at the time of construction on the property adjacent to your home. It is also important to mention that the two adjacent property owners, the real parties at interest, did seem to concur with respect to the measures that should be taken on the adjacent property. The city inspector's obligation in all of this was to represent the general interests of the City of Orono. We do not feel that the inspector had undertaken a direct duty to either the prior owner of your property or to any subsequent owners of that property to guarantee that no water would come onto the property from neighboring land. City inspectors have no duty to accomplish this. Even if they did have such a duty, a question would arise with respect to whom the duty might be owed. At the time that the construction occurred next to your property, you did not own it. The previous owner of the property participated in and agreed to the measures that were taken by the adjacent property owner. In essence, the actions that were undertaken constituted an agreement between the prior owner of your property and the owner of the adjacent property regarding what should be done. We do not think that the City would have had any obligation to either party to press for something different than they had agreed to. Further, we question whether you as new owners of the property would have a right to claim that any party had an obligation to change anything agreed by the prior owner of your property. Generally, property is bought as is, including its circumstances relative to conditions on adjacent property. In order to breach a duty one must, in the first place, have a duty. As previously indicated, we do not believe the City had a direct duty to you personally to protect the property at 1030 2