It started as a disagreement over sewer easements near Cazenovia Creek in West Seneca, where three property owners took the town to State Supreme Court and got a temporary restraining order.
Now, West Seneca has started to seize the land around the sewer line from them through eminent domain.
“It’s so disrespectful, and it’s awful,” said Kate Kotecki, who runs Kotecki’s Grandview Grove on Seneca Street, the business her father started 34 years ago.
Kotecki noticed an excavator near the creek on the 13-acre grounds of the popular wedding and banquet venue in the fall. When she checked with town officials, she was told the town was raising sewer manholes.
The two manholes on her property sat about 4 feet above the ground, with a mound of grass over them. Today, they are about 9 feet high and about 40 feet wide, with boulders along the sides with access roads of asphalt millings leading to the top of the manhole.
“I’m just heartbroken,” she said. “I would go down there and cry.”
Kotecki also is incensed that crews went on her property without permission. She maintains that they did not stay within the confines of the easement, and that they cut down trees and altered the area where many of her patrons have gathered for wedding photographs.
“They never told me what was happening, at all. They just barged in,” she said of the town.
Supervisor Gary Dickson said in a Facebook post that it was a mistake not to notify residents, and in a press release the town said it did not follow its “normal practice” of notifying residents of the work to be done.
“This was a mistake, but it did not change the necessity of the project or the right of the town to carry out the work,” the statement said.
Dickson said on Facebook and in the statement that the work was done to correct sewer overflows and backups that occurred in February 2022 when Cazenovia Creek flooded from ice jams. The ice damaged some of the manhole covers…
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