PITTSBURGH - A federal judge has tossed what's left of a lawsuit over a Westmoreland County neighborhood dispute, brought by a woman running an animal-and-people rescue in Rostraver Township.
Pittsburgh federal judge Mark Hornak on Feb. 25 granted summary judgment to defendants including the town's zoning officer in a lawsuit brought in 2022 by Wendi Kraemer.
Kraemer moved to Adams Drive in 2015 and established Angels Journey Home Rescue, which first operated as a cat sanctuary but expanded to provide services to unhoused veterans.
"Suffice it to say that Ms. Kraemer and her neighbors do not get along," Hornak wrote.
Among the players in the case are:
-Neighbor Gary Beck, a town commissioner and chairman of the Public Safety Committee who acts as an "informal receptacle for neighborhood complaints";
-Neighbor Mary Sue Colburn, a secretary for the town's zoning officer;
-Frank Monack, the town's zoning officer, code enforcement officer and building code official.
Complaints about Kraemer's property started in 2016. They alleged she would leave as many as 30 bags of trash out, even though the waste service company, Big's, only takes up to six per week.
Some of the leftover trash would be left out and stink up the neighborhood, and some would be burned, complaints said. Neighbors also complained about structures Kraemer built and the amount of traffic her activities generated.
Monack suggested a petition from Colborn would help address these complaints. Beck, the town commissioner, said he was not involved in drafting it, but Kraemer claimed he was, with the goal of getting Kraemer "out of here."
Kraemer also alleged Beck loudly said racial slurs during a yard sale when she had Black volunteers working. He denies this.
In 2022, a fire caused major damage to Kraemer's house. Monack told her she needed a building permit, sewage inspection and a report on structural soundness from an engineer to rebuild.
Monack issued the building permit on Aug. 2, 2022, and Kraemer filed her lawsuit three weeks later. A year earlier, Big's had stopped picking up her trash.
She named 10 defendants in her case, all of whom had been dismissed except the town, Beck and Monack. She claimed Beck and the town told Big's to stop collecting her trash and delayed issuance of a building permit for eight months, while forcing her to file the engineer report and septic inspection even though others did not have to do so.
A jury could not find requiring that paperwork was "irrational and wholly arbitrary," Judge Hornak wrote.
"Defendants assert that Monack requested a sewage inspection because he had been told by Colborn, who had at one point looked to purchase Kraemer's home, that the residence had no septic system or a very small one," Hornak wrote.
"Given the amount of water that was sprayed into the house to put out the fire, Monack was concerned that such a system might have been inundated and no longer functional."
As to trash pickup, Kraemer alleged a Big's worker had told her Beck had told the company to stop collecting her waste and submitted an affidavit from another person that she says corroborates that account.
"Both pieces of evidence are out-of-court statements offered to prove the truth of the matters asserted in the statements, and neither can be considered here," Hornak wrote.
Beck's alleged statement would be admissible if the Big's employee was available to testify, but Hornak said at this point, Kraemer hasn't been able to identify him beyond the description of a "young, Black gentleman."
"At this point, all the Court has is Plaintiffs' speculation that, sometime before trial, they will identify the Big's front-line trash-pickup employee that they describe and be able to summon that person to the witness stand to testify," Hornak wrote.
"But that is not nearly enough for the Court to conclude that this employee will be available to testify at trial."