Charlottetown begins cleanup after ditch infilling snafu

Residents on Charlottetown's Amanda Drive have waited three weeks for city contractors to clean up a mess left behind after they began, then abandoned, a ditch infilling project.

Late Tuesday afternoon, just as CBC was wrapping up a story about residents' mounting impatience, the machinery arrived.

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The city had called a halt to the ditch infilling after resident Matthew Eye pointed out it wasn't necessary some residents had done the work themselves a few years before.

"Every time it rains, this looks like rotten tomato soup," Eye told CBC reporter Steve Bruce earlier Tuesday.

"It's aesthetically not very pleasing, and this is the prime time of the year where you're out mowing your lawn and playing on your front lawn, and right now, it's nothing but a sand trap."

Sodding begins

City councillor and public works committee chair Terry Bernard said it wasn't realistic to have the lawns sodded any earlier.

"When we put a stop work order on that project, that moved the contractor to the next project," explained Bernard.

"You can't bounce the contractor around from place to place."

The city still has no explanation as to why the work was begun in the first place officials still need to sit down with the engineering consultant who ordered the work.

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