MYFOXNY.COM - A New Jersey town is accused of stealing a homeowner's sidewalk and then blaming the resident.
"I left for work in the morning and I had a sidewalk. When I came home, the sidewalk was gone," Rosemary Ceracchio says.
The Bloomfield, N.J. woman was shocked to find the sidewalk she'd paid $1,300 to fix was completely ripped up.
She called the mayor's office and said, "Someone stole my sidewalk."
That someone turned out to be a contractor working for Bloomfield's sidewalk repair department. The contractor ripped out the new sidewalk. To make matters worse, they had not been back for 10 days.
Ceracchio has put up a few safety cones and some warning tape because the contractor didn't even do that much after creating the trench.
She called it a "grave" and was worried about the liability she could face if someone got hurt in front of her house.
The reason her sidewalk was torn up dates back to a request she made on Dec. 1, 2010. The city had a program to repair cracks in sidewalks caused by city owned trees. Ceracchio says she never heard back from the city on the application.
Then, in August, her home owner's insurance company did an inspection on her property and cited her for cracked front walks. She was told that she had 30 days to fix the problem or potentially lose her insurance.
That's when she paid for her own contractor to repair the problem. She sent photos of the repaired walks to the insurance company and they gave her the O-K.
Then, four months later, the city sent the crew without notifying Ceracchio.
The town said it was Ceracchio's fault for not contacting the city that her sidewalk no longer needed repair.
After Fox 5 News contacted the city about the issue, a new sidewalk was quickly poured. Ceracchio is glad to have a sidewalk again, but is upset that she had to shell out the $1,300 when she could have had the repairs for free.
Arnold Diaz, the winner of 36 Emmy awards for his consumer investigative reporting, joined Fox's WNYW-TV in March 2006. He continues his longstanding investigative career with his infamous "Shame, Shame,
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