Photo courtesy of Ashley Bain The owners of this house on 7th S. in Calumet, that suffered severed fire damage in June 2018, have finally received the go-ahead from inspectors and engineers to begin rebuilding the structure. However, they are unable to access the property, they say, because the Village Street Department is using the property for a snow dump. The owners say they are trying to resolve several issues with the village.

CALUMET — The Village Council has come under scrutiny yet again, this time in reference to a fire insurance check from 2018, along with a snow removal issue yet to be resolved.

Ashley and Andrew Bain, the owners of a property on 7th St., that is currently uninhabitable, say they have been fighting with the Village Council and Village Manager Caleb Katz in addition to the Street Department, and “every office that we could be in contact with.”

Mrs. Bain, in an email, said that after the house was nearly destroyed by fire in June 2018, they contracted with inspectors, architects and engineers to evaluate the stability of the structure with the intention of repairing it.

Bain referred to an Oct. 23, 2019, Daily Mining Gazette article regarding the council coming under fire at its October regular meeting, about two fire insurance checks in the village’s possession, with which they allegedly had done nothing, according to a former member of the board.

Bain said that since the date the article was published until recently, she and her husband have been trying to get issues resolved with the village, one of which is that one of the insurance checks was issued for the clean-up of the 7th St. property.

“I don’t believe they have any intention of returning the funds to the insured (us/my father-in-law) or our insurance company,” she stated in her email.

The fire in question occurred around 12:30 a.m. on Sunday, June 10, 2018, when an abandoned church on Seventh Street caught fire and spread next door to the house owned by the Bains.

During the October 2018 council meeting, the status and the whereabouts of the insurance checks was brought up by a village resident and former council trustee. Of the five trustees present, none of them was aware of the checks. Dave Geisler, who served as village president at the time, said he did not recall details, as it had been months since he had last heard about it.

The other fire insurance check had been sent to the village to fund the clean-up of a property on the north end of 5th St. that had been destroyed by fire in 2017.

In this particular case, the former trustee said at the time, that the village filed a complaint with the state, in which it said the property owner had not cleaned the site, and the village, therefore, would. The Michigan Department of Licensing and Regulatory Affairs, contacted the insurer.

A bill was submitted for asbestos abatement, and site clean-up, said the former trustee, and in response, the insurer mailed a check in the amount of $12,557. The property owner had, in fact, cleaned up the site in November, and it was not until February (2018) the council learned the check was still in the office.

The check was accompanied by a letter instructing the village to inform the insured once the clean-up was complete, because the check was to be used for that purpose, the DMG reported.

“The village never let Farmers know that the insured cleaned it up on her own nickel,” said the former trustee, “and we never sent the check back, even though we said we needed that money to clean it up.”

The village office received the check, said the former trustee, but the trustees were not informed that it had arrived.

In the meantime, Bain said she and her husband were informed that the structure was repairable, and they informed Katz of their plans to do so.

“Mr. Katz informed me that in addition to us spending the money on fixing our properties,” said Mrs. Bain, “we could spend more money to sign a contract for the village to plow and remove the snow, for us to access our property during the six months of winter/snow we have here,” adding that “(they clearly piled on our property) and they continue to do yearly.”

The Bains needed several months to acquire the revenue to hire a contractor to begin the work, she said. But when they approached the property, they found it virtually buried in snow and inaccessible.