WHYY‘s Elizabeth Fiedler always handles herself like a pro. Last week, when she noticed the problem of construction crews dumping garbage in an abandoned lot by her house was getting worse, she wrote a piece about it on Newsworks. On top of that piece, she’s been calling 311, L&I, SWEEP, and more over the last year-plus to try to get this to stop.

To help bring light to the problem, Claudia Gomez did a report on Fox29 about all of the dumping and L&I violations, which can be seen over here. And after that report was filed, the city responded. According to Newsworks, “The city’s department of licenses and inspections issued several violations notices against the contractor, KDM Construction. When the violations weren’t abated, the city posted a “stop work” order at the site Wednesday morning where KDM was renovating a building.”

From there, shit got real nuts. There’s a whole Storify thing on Newsworks, but the gist of what happened was this: Fiedler was threatened by the contractor and hypothetically banned from the coffee shop the building will hold. The workers kept working. The police were called to enforce the stop work order, but the contractor told Fiedler he “knew a guy” at the office who got the order removed. He then continued to insult her and once again enforce his hypothetical coffee shop ban. After some more action by Fiedler, the Police, and L&I, the site was shut down.

So as of now, the work has stopped. But take this as a warning, KDM Construction contractor: If you mess with Elizabeth Fiedler and Claudia Gomez, you get the horns. Oh also, stop being such a dick.

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 18th, 2012 at 1:43 pm.