[undercoverbrother]

Originally Posted by Titan2

I really don't have any idea what you are getting at. The answer is yes, in your scenario. And if they drove over grandmas vase they would have to replace that too. And if for some reason you had your house/fence made out of teak or maple or something they have to replace with that level of material, not just normal pine or whatever.

Sorry you are wrong.

The City would absolutely not be on for the $50,000 costs.

They don't owe the replacement, they owe the value of the items they damaged not the cost to replacement them.

You take your victim as you find them and you have to put them back to the condition they were in prior to your actions as best as possible. At least that is how I learned it in law school and six and a half years as a litigator for the City.

But you can't put them into a the position they were with an older fence.

They are in a better position with a new fence.

They need to provide him with a fence that looks like a city truck did not run into it. They do not get a cost for replacing the fence and then depreciate it for the age of the fence. That would only happen in a policy situation like the roof in my earlier example.

To use your car example with a slight change, they fix the car or they give you the value of the car. You don't get a new car, you get the value of the car you had. Same as the fence. (To clarify this is closer to what you are saying. You would get what your car would be worth on the day it is wrecked not when it was new.)

Let's use the roof as a different example. Let's say they somehow cause a 10 x 10 hole in your roof. Do they have to replace the whole roof? No. They have to fix the hole as close as possible to how it was. Maybe, maybe, you can convince a judge that a non-matching roof is terrible and you should be reimbursed the full cost to replace the whole roof. However, they may say we will give you X to fix the hole and then you can decide to do the rest of the roof at your own cost and at the same time. But they are not going to say, we will fix the hole for $X but because your roof is 20 years old, after depreciating the value of the roof, you actually don't get your hole fixed. That makes no sense at all.

In the OPs situation, this is a chequebook case. Show the video and they get out the chequebook. They want quotes to justify how much to write the check to their superiors. The amounts we are talking are immaterial to an entity the size of the City.

Using vehicles is a poor comparison because there is no such thing as replacement cost insurance on a vehicle (with a caveat or two, sometimes you can get a 2 yr waiver of deprecation).

In one of my previous lives this is what I did, I paid for things that were damaged by us.

Sometimes I paid the full hit, but only if it made business sense for us. Tis might be how the City approaches it, but I've dealt with municipalities across and if there is one thing they like to do it is not pay a penny more than they should.

But mostly I paid the value of what was damaged. Not the cost to repair/replace it. I've been through some ligation on it as well and there was never any discussion of us paying full shot or getting our full shot paid. It was always a depreciated amount.