LEWISTON – Whether it was contaminated soil dumped on his neighbor’s lot, or water from a diverted spring, Jean Marc Giroux is convinced something has leached onto his property and killed his trees.

He expects the city to replace the eight white pines that are dead or dying in his backyard. He’s been fighting this battle for 15 years, and it’s time for someone to pay for the damage, he said.

“To remove the dead things, to replace them all, it’s about $10,000,” Giroux said. He would settle for 15 trees that are 20 feet tall, to replace the eight big ones, he said.

City officials don’t doubt runoff from the lot next door killed his trees, but they suggest Giroux’s anger is misplaced.

“I don’t think his argument is with us,” said Phil Nadeau, deputy city administrator. “We’ve put a lot of work into this. We’ve been over it and over it, and there just isn’t much more we can do that this point.”

Nadeau said everyone agrees the problem began in June 1994, when city crews dumped dirt, rock and fill onto the lot next to Giroux’s property, owned at the time by Chuck Starbird of Starbird Construction.

“The owner had asked the city for fill, and it was approved,” Nadeau said. “We heard from Mr. Giroux the next day.”

Giroux said he had arrived home after work to find city crews filling the neighbor’s back lot.

“They didn’t ask me; they didn’t warn me; nothing,” Giroux said. “They just started dumping.”

Debris began sliding into his yard, some of it wet and muddy. Whoever was doing the dumping didn’t realize there was an old spring running through the property, he said.

“It’s a spring next door, and when they came in and dumped all that stuff in that lot, it diverted that spring right into my yard,” he said. “And here I sit.”

Since then, Giroux said, his backyard is marshy and smelly year-round. He alleges that his neighbor had a septic tank on the lot at one time and it was never removed. He’s also convinced that the fill dumped on the lot contained asphalt and other contaminants.

“It’s the smell that gets you,” he said. “It gets going in the summer. You can’t open the back windows because of that smell. It’s horrible; it stinks and it wasn’t there.”

Some of the debris slid into his yard on Aug. 1, 1994. City workers tried to stabilize it. They were out at least once each week for the rest of the month, inspecting the slope between the yards.

“They came in at one point and started planting here, to hold the soil together and get some of that moisture,” Giroux said. It worked, to some extent, because Starbird Construction was able to build a house on the property in 1996. They sold the property, and it has sold at least once since then.

But Giroux’s problems didn’t go away. The northwestern corner of his yard remained marshy and his trees began to die. He’s had to cut down three of them. Three others are dead but still standing, and two are all but dead.

“They were big trees, old trees and they were big when I moved in there in 1972,” he said. “They didn’t start to die off until all this happened.”

It’s been a slow death, he said. Tree experts, including Lewiston arborist Steve Murch and Maine Forest Service entomologist Charlene Donahue guess that the water is behind the trees’ death. White pines thrive in dry soil, and Giroux’s trees were big.

“This indicated to me that this area was dry at one point, which allowed them to grow to this size,” Murch wrote in a 2008 letter to Giroux. “For the fact that a row of trees all died within a short time and others in the area remained healthy indicated a change in the site.”

The trees’ roots basically drowned, Donahue wrote in a second 2008 letter.

A soil test performed in 2006 didn’t show any pollution or contamination – no fecal coliform, E. coli or detergent. Giroux insists pollution is to blame and says he will hire a firm to test the soil himself.

“It think that something is coming down from up there, and it’s not healthy,” he said.

Ward 4 City Councilor Denis Theriault said he’ll wait for Giroux’s independent testing.

“If we do something wrong, we say so,” Theriault said. “If sampling says we put something there that shouldn’t be there, I’ll bring that to the City Council.”