How to piss off adjacent property owners during a major development.

There is a fairly significant building being built a few doors down from our office here at 84 Fitzroy Street. Two weeks ago the developers of the project were kicked off the adjacent lot by the owners of the lot. The developers, seemingly overnight, took over the street. They completely fenced in and blocked all traffic to our block of the one-way street Fitzroy. In theory the closure of the street is fine, but what’s happened during this whole process is not fine.

The city of Charlottetown should be ashamed of itself. Here’s why:

• No notice was given to adjacent properties of the street closure. None, nada, zip. I found out about it by not being able to get to work the morning it happened. I later read the news article in the local paper. The city, as far as I can understand, broke their own by-law by not giving us notice. Talk about asking to be sued. I'm suspicious there wasn't even an application for the closure by the developer.
  
  Update: Apparently the city decided to use the police's ability to temporary close a street (intended for parades, accidents, etc) to close down this block of Fitzroy. The by-law I linked to above is for permanent street closures. I would argue that closing a street for 8 weeks leans more towards permanent than it does to "need to block this street off for an accident". It's a stretch of the intent of the police's ability.


• So the street is closed on one end, that’s fine. We can always come in the other way, which the city has thankfully allowed. But just for good measure we’re not allowed to park anywhere. The city has taken the roughly 10-15 street-side parking spots and made them all no-parking. They changed the signs overnight then ticketed EVERYONE, included a fair number of our staff, the following day. The ironic part is that the the parking is not in the way of development. The rest of the street now just sits empty all day. Yes, there needs to be some space at the end of the temporary cul-de-sac to turn around but the entire street does not need to be parking free. Classy act Charlottetown: Illegally close a street, inconvenience the neighbours, then ticket them all at once.
  
  Update:: The city took note of this and have, as you can see in the comments below, started to take steps to remedy this. They are arranging alternate parking, cancelling tickets, and generally being fantastic about the whole thing.


• To top it all off, and what has finally forced me to take some action (writing this post and filing an official complaint), is that today they decided to not plow the street. It snowed last night. Every other street in Charlottetown has been plowed, but not ours. Nope. Nada. Zilch. Now I’m pretty sure that’s breaking a law. How about this Charlottetown? If you’d like to stop providing us with services we’ll stop paying our taxes? Deal?
  
  Update: Our street is still a mess. Hasn't been plowed or cleared. We're getting close to a foot of snow tonight. I'll let you know tomorrow how this pans out.

It should be noted that I am a strong supporter of the new development. I’m not complaining about it, just about how the city has handled it on our street.