Looking for advice on dealing with a claim with the Providence city law department.

Submitted by PetalPerfection t3_1097ijt in providence

Hi all, wondering if anyone has any experience dealing with the Providence law department for a claim made against the city? We are having issues getting anyone to respond to us and I’m not sure what to do at this point.

The TL;DR on this is that in June the city had a sewer issue that caused 1,200 gallons of raw sewage to back up into our basement. The damage was immense, as you can imagine.

We filed our claim with the city and then got referred to the city law department for getting it approved. We were in touch with a woman from the law dept. for months and then suddenly in Oct she stopped responding. I reached back out to the city claims this week to find out wtf is going on only to find out our claim was approved on Sept 28th. The city lawyer was supposed to let us know, she did not. And the city cannot release funds to us without the release form, and guess who we get the release form from?

We’ve been emailing and calling this woman non-stop for over a week to get this stupid form and we cannot get her to answer us. I am at a loss of what to do here and curious if anyone else has dealt with this. Any advice is welcome at this point.

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rowdysailor t1_j3wlpe8 wrote

So this is want constituent services in your councilman's office are for. Call them. They can help get thru the process for you.

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PetalPerfection OP t1_j3wwedo wrote

Thank you. I had reached out to our city council member and got nothing back but I did not do it via constituent services. This is likely our best bet for any type of escalation here.

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Kelruss t1_j3xh1j5 wrote

Just want to note that there are two constituent services associates who serve the entire council; you won’t really be going through an individual councilor’s office.

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PetalPerfection OP t1_j3xxqu5 wrote

Ahh, I was hoping it was with the specific city council member. I spoke with one of the constituent associates early on in this saga and they referred us to the claims department and the head of sewer (both of whom we were already dealing with). I have not, however, reached back out recently about the latest issue so I’ll give it another go. Thank you again for this suggestion.

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fishythepete t1_j3wlpim wrote

Contact your council person, they should be able to escalate.

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babsonnexus t1_j3wprr4 wrote

Not trying to be confrontational, but I'm wondering why your insurance company is not handling this? They should have paid for everything (less deductible) and been working with the city to get themselves made whole; it is what you pay them for!

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PetalPerfection OP t1_j3wvk2m wrote

We agree but State Farm did not see it that way and this may have to do with the size of the claim (over $30k). From the insurance companies POV this is the city’s fault, and therefore the city must be the ones to pay out to us. Insurance gave us $5k, which is what we had for sewage coverage. That $5k did not even cover the hazard cleaning that was required, we still owe another $3k to that company. (Cleaning company has been amazing btw, can’t say enough good things about Clean Works who have been also calling the city lawyer on our behalf)

This is just one of many frustrating things that has occurred as part of this incident.

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babsonnexus t1_j3wztrv wrote

I'm sorry, I know you were trying to be a nice, reasonable, and logical person, but almost everyone else was out to screw you over and did so (it is their job to protect their company's interests, not yours). You never should have accepted or signed anything from the insurance company if that was the way they were acting and instead needed to get a lawyer involved. It might be too late because of the actions you have taken, but you should get a free consultation and see if one can do something for you. Even a lawyer just calling the City one time might make the check show up magically tomorrow, so the $300 would be worth it.

Just as an FYI, the amount is not the issue. I dealt with a $100K claim at an unoccupied property I was involved with and never touched the money myself; everything went between the insurance company and the contractors. I was lucky enough in this case that the contractors did all the battling with the insurance company so I did not have to get a lawyer involved myself. A lot of contractors don't like doing this, so YMMV.

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PetalPerfection OP t1_j3xv7v5 wrote

I appreciate the advice but we did get a lawyer involved at the start. Dealing with the city is not at all the same with dealing contractors.

First off, most lawyers didn’t want to touch this issue with a 10ft pole because it’s near impossible to challenge a city on these matters. We had to call the Rhode Island bar association to even get someone to talk to us about what our rights were and what we can do. If the city had refused to take responsibility that would have been different but they admitted responsibility from Day 1.

Secondly, we were basically told that the insurance company is under no obligation to chase the city on our behalf. Our policy allowed for $5k in sewer damages, and as noted, we were lucky we even got that. They denied us twice. Could we have kept fighting them? Maybe, but that would have slowed down this process even more. No one wants to deal with city claims because cities are slow to pay out.

And for the record, if we don’t get an answer from the city lawyer soon we will go the legal route again but that means losing money again and we don’t get to recoup those fees.

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PetalPerfection OP t1_j3wx8uj wrote

Oh, and fwiw, insurance companies not paying out for city damages is apparently a thing. We were told by our cleaning company, AND by various contractors that we spoke with for estimates that insurance companies almost always deny claims having to do with damage caused by the city. Apparently we were lucky to even get $5k. If anyone on here is an insurance claims specialist I’d love to know what that is about.

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theovertalker t1_j3x2rp3 wrote

You need a lawyer. The only way to get your issue settled is with a lawsuit or the threat of one. That’s just how it is.

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PetalPerfection OP t1_j3xx82w wrote

We thought the same thing. Unfortunately it’s near impossible to sue a city. Wish I was joking. We met with a lawyer and it turns out the only way we could sue here is via negligence and we thought we had a good case for that but nope. Turns out that we would have needed to prove that the city knew this situation could happen. And because this was likely caused by a fat berg it was even less likely to be deemed negligence by the city. because it’s homeowners who pour cooking oil down the drain and flush tampons and other things like that, that cause fat bergs to form.

As I noted to the other person who mentioned a lawyer below, we talked with lawyers and no one wanted to deal with this. The claim is approved at this point so hiring a lawyer, again, at this stage means paying out of our own pocket.

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hurricanetruther t1_j3xa1w8 wrote

Councilperson's a good option as others have said. Also you can try the Mayor's Office. There's a new mayor and his administration may be inclined to assist.

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Double_Farmer_2662 t1_j48wwyo wrote

Good luck. We’ve had problems with the city before, they so hard to get a hold of. Keep making claims through the 311 they tend to respond to that. Insurance is a nightmare, we had a ceiling collapse, and they refused to pay. And so did our landlord. We called about 10 lawyers, no responses.

The system is sooo broken. The center for justice stopped returning our calls, we’re out $7k that no one wants to Pay for, and we can’t even find a lawyer to help us.

Don’t give up and keep trying! I wish I had better answers for you, but I don’t :/ I understand your frustration though

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PetalPerfection OP t1_j49a90p wrote

I’m so sorry this happened to you. It’s insane that the city can cause massive and unexpected damage to your home and then just take their sweet time compensating you for their damage.

We made several calls to 311 and the lawyer finally got back to us yesterday. Now we have the form that we need to get the check but I can only imagine how long it will take for the check to arrive.

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