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I EUGENE Public Works Maintenance City of Eugene 1820 Roosevelt Boulevard Eugene, Oregon 97402 (541) 682 -4800 November 26, 1997 Kim DeMarcus Bennett Management Co. P.O. Box 10342 Eugene, OR 97440 Dear Kim: This letter is a follow up to the phone conversation we had a couple of weeks ago relating to a duplex property at 795/797 High Street. I looked at the site with our concrete supervisor and our Urban Forester. We focused our inspection on the first tree north of 8th Street and the following is a summary of our findings and recommendations: The trees which front the duplex are Red Maples and according to Scott Plamondon, our Urban Forester, these trees generally have a shallow root system. Since the trees are in the High Street parking strip, the trees belong to the City as opposed to the property owner. The trees in question are in good health and we do not plan to remove them. However, if the property owner removes the porch and roots are present from these trees, our tree crew staff would do some root pruning at that time. This tree's roots do extend under the sidewalk. We have a sidewalk inspection program whereby our inspector looks for and documents hazardous situations. When a sidewalk is determined hawirdous, we contact the adjacent property owner and notify them to make the repairs. The main criteria we look for while inspecting for hazards is offset sidewalk sections of 1/2" or more. Using this criteria there are no hazards fronting the duplex at this time and no need for us to contact the property owner to make repairs. While doing the site visit, we also looked at the other issues you mentioned during our telephone conversation. Those issues were the settlement of the porch, the failure of the brick planter, the rain gutter downspouts, dry rot to the building, and concern about the basement foundation. We believe the porch settlement is caused from moisture and erosion under the porch, or improper compaction of the porch bedding when the porch was constructed. Given the age of the structure we believe the settlement is more than likely caused from moisture under the porch than from improper compaction. We are comfortable that any settlement would not have been caused by tree roots, as tree roots near the ground surface and under the porch would more than likely have helped to stabilize the porch as opposed to having caused erosion. It appears the porch settlement also caused the masonry failure since the brickwork is falling forward toward the sidewalk. A close inspection of the downspout drains indicate they may be a major contributor to the moisture source. Where the downspout goes into the porch the drainpipe is necked down to a much smaller size and if plugged, or during heavy rain, the water would exit at that point as opposed to continuing through the downspout and to the drain exit. The drain itself is actually illegal since it drains on to