Garage owners demand solution to seven-year-long water leak problem

A group of Mtarfa residents are urging the authorities to take action after what they deem to have been inadequate resurfacing works on a car park overlying their property caused water to leak into their underground garages for the past seven years.

“Most of the steel netting in the concrete ceiling of our garages has become rusty and blocks are falling off... Already, in one of the 22 garages, part of the roof caved in... We are worried big rocks will fall and injure one of us,” said garage owner Jean Paul Pisani, indicating the damage. Behind him, water dripped into a plastic basin placed on top of a car.

With documents in hand and surrounded by other owners, Mr Pisani explained the garages were located close to a government housing block and beneath a parking lot.

The owners had bought the garages from the Housing Authority. In 2003, the parking area was resurfaced but the owners say the works had not been carried out properly and the ground remained porous, allowing water to leak into the garages below causing structural damage.

The residents have been battling with the authorities to remedy the situation since 2003. In August of that year they received a letter from the Housing Authority informing them the parking area was the responsibility of the local council.

“The Housing Authority no longer has responsibility of or authority over that piece of public land in Mtarfa... the local council was legally handed over responsibility in 2000,” the letter, seen by The Times, said adding it was the council that carried out the works on the car park.

The garage owners therefore turned to the council.

In June 2009, mayor Anthony Mifsud wrote to residents saying he was “glad to inform them” the council was looking into the matter and getting an estimate of the costs to ensure water no longer seeped into their garages. However, nothing has been done since.

When contacted this week, Mr Mifsud said he was doing all he could to find a solution. He was in talks with a lawyer to discuss the way forward.

He said he had appointed an architect who reported the works would cost over €50,000. These were public funds and, before shouldering the expense, the council was legally obliged to prove such works were necessary, the mayor explained.

The problem was he could not find any documentation in the 2003 minutes proving the works on the car park had been carried out by the local council. “Unless it’s in the minutes, I can’t say it happened for a fact... If the works were done by the council, they were not recorded,” he said adding that when he became mayor in 2008 he inherited “the good and the bad” from his predecessors.

When asked specifically who else could have carried out the works if not the council, Mr Mifsud reiterated he only took over in 2008 and had no idea what could have happened before unless he had the documents in hand.

Mr Mifsud said he was also waiting for the Housing Authority to hand him documentation to show who, from the council, had signed the devolution of land.

The case echoes the findings of a recent report in which Ombudsman Joseph Said Pullicino criticised the authorities for ignoring the complaints of a Qawra garage owner.

Bad workmanship by a contractor, carrying out works on behalf of the Public Transport Authority in 2004, had caused the garage to flood every time it rained. After three years of excuses the complainant turned to the Ombudsman. Three years later, not only was no action taken to remedy the situation but, in his report, the Ombudsman chronicled a list of episodes in which his office was completely ignored or dismissed with unsatisfactory replies by the authority in what he described as “an instance of sheer arrogance”.