Chicago taxpayers will spend $9.5 million to compensate a man who suffered life-altering injuries caused by the city’s decision to designate a bike path on a Hyde Park street that once carried electric streetcars without first removing the rail embedded in the street.
Mayor Lori Lightfoot campaigned on a promise to implement a risk management system to rein in runaway settlements. She lured the director of enterprise risk management for the city of Atlanta, to lead the new Office of Risk Management.
Tamika Puckett may want to begin by examining circumstances surrounding the $9.5 million settlement on the agenda for Monday’s meeting of the City Council’s Finance Committee.
It goes to Catalin Dumitrescu, who was “significantly disfigured and disabled” on Oct. 25, 2014 when he fell off his bike while riding on East 56th Street in Hyde Park.
Dumitrescu’s lawsuit accuses the city of a stunning pattern of negligence that started with the decision to designate the bike path without first removing the rail embedded in the street.
The streetcars stopped running “in or around 1958,” but the rail remained. It was “periodically paved over,” even though “other rails were removed” across the city, the lawsuit states.
“By no later than 2011 and likely before, the rail was exposed through the surface of the asphalt in what was now designated as a bike route,” the lawsuit states.
“Prior to Oct. 25, 2014….[the city] knew of the defective state or disrepair…by way of multiple depressions, holes, inequalities, impressions, crevices and/or raises, and included but not limited to the unneeded streetcar rail.”
The city had an obligation to “conduct repair and maintenance with reasonable care” to avoid endangering users. City Hall “knew or should have known” that designating a bike path on the street endangered Dumitrescu and other users, the suit states.
Instead, “defective conditions of the roadway” caused by the “unneeded streetcar rail” and the city’s pattern of negligence caused Dumitrescu to fall from his bike while riding on 56th Street near South Harper.
The alphabetized bill of particulars against the city runs from A-to-K. It includes:
• Designating the street as a bike route “without proper inspection beforehand.”
• Failing to remove the unneeded streetcar rail, “allowing it to become a street hazard.”
• Applying asphalt over the rail, resulting in “inherently inferior coverage” that allowed the “rail to become exposed over a relatively short time-frame.”
• Placing “pothole patch after pothole patch” on the street.
• Neglecting to inspect the street, report the “unsafe condition” or even have a “standard in place to ensure proper repair materials were placed on the defective road surface, including the rail.”
• “Carelessly, negligently and improperly failing or refusing to remove the unsafe and dangerous condition” of the street even though it “knew or should have known that such failure or refusal would cause injury.”
Neither Dumitrescu nor his attorney, Todd Smith, could be reached for comment. Puckett refused to comment. So did the city’s Law Department.
The $9.5 million settlement is one of four on the Finance Committee agenda. Aldermen will also be asked to approve three other settlements — for $450,000, $700,000 and $300,000— all of them tied to allegations of police wrongdoing.
Earlier this year, the City Council signed off on a $4 million settlement stemming from a fatal accident tied to the city’s weed cutting program.
That settlement compensated the family of Samyra Lee, a 7-year-old Englewood girl struck and killed in May 2016 by a tractor being driven by an employee of Truck Tire Sales, the city’s weed cutting contractor.
Although Truck Tire Sales hired its own seasonal workers and used company-owned equipment, Rodney noted the city’s case against liability was weakened by the extraordinary control the city exercised over the contractor.
The company’s tractors — with “stickers bearing the city’s emblem” — were stored at city ward yards, where weed-cutters started and ended their shifts.
The city dictated what time the weed cutters took lunch and required them to maintain a “Weed-Cutting Daily Report.” If they did not follow those terms, they could be “sent home,” she said.
The selection of a new weed cutting contractor is on hold pending a review of the tragedy by the Departments of Law and Streets and Sanitation.
Possibilities include higher insurance requirements, increased safety requirements and additional separation between City Hall and the private contractor, aldermen were told.
