City steps in to clean up garbage pile on residential Dorval street

After numerous complaints from residents, the city of Dorval has taken away a pile of furniture and garbage that was strewn along Roy Avenue.

City work crews with bulldozers and a loading container removed the unsightly clutter early Wednesday.

The items, which included, dressers, couches and trash, had been removed from a nearby residence and left on the curb, blocking nearly half of the residential street for almost a week.

“It was not that bad at first, but then people started picking through it and scattering it around making it even worse than it was,” resident Fred Cardinal said.

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According to the bailiff, Pietro Marera, the owner of the house is currently out of the country.

The tenants of the home were recently evicted for not paying rent for what he described as some time.

Marera said the tenants’ belongings were moved into the street to allow them to go through them.

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The large pile stretched several metres, cluttering the street and the sidewalk with debris, and becoming the source of a number of complaints from residents to the city.

“I was surprised the police didn’t do anything earlier because it was blocking half the street,” resident Jill Walker said.

Walker said she has never been so thrilled to hear the sound of a bulldozer crunching material so early in the morning,

“As soon as I heard, I came out cheering.”

After walking by the mess on a daily basis, resident Molly O’Neil said she was overjoyed to see work crews take away the trash.

“There is just so much of it. It’s basically a whole house worth of stuff on the street,” said O’Neil, who added she was “happy to see it gone.”

In cases of eviction, the city does not normally intervene, Dorval Mayor Marc Doret said. But in this case, he said the city needed to act.

“The bailiffs would have to provide a method of disposing of the house contents. But because it’s been here for six days, the city has to take action,” Doret said.

Doret explained the city is only helping with the removal of the contents; the bailiff and the owner of the home are responsible for the fees of the dumpster.

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The container filled with the house contents will be brought to a different location and held for an undisclosed number of days, according to the city. That would allow the owner to deal with the belongings, if they so choose.

“They are going to be taken to a different location and that will be between the landowner, the bailiff and the tenants,” Doret said.