An eastern Iowa man has won another round in his legal battle with the City of Vinton. Rodney Moore complained dozens of times to city officials about flooding in the basement of his Vinton home. Moore found out an undisclosed sewer line ran under his home. After four years of flooding, he finally sued and the city rerouted the sewer line and that stopped the flooding. A jury decided the City of Vinton should pay Moore just over 32-thousand dollars to cover water damage to antiques and other stuff in the basement and because he got an electrical shock once when a pump was working to rid the basement of water. The city appealed, but the Iowa Court of Appeals has ruled Vinton must pay up.The Iowa Court of Appeals has also weighed in on what some would call a cat fight in a Cedar Rapids bar. Lisa Smith sued a Cedar Rapids nightclub known as Shagnasty’s after a confrontation there in August of 2002. Smith says another woman in the bar hit her in the head with a beer bottle. Smith grabbed the woman by the hair, and bouncers separated the two. When cops got to the bar, the other woman involved in the tussle was no where to be found. Smith’s lawsuit charged Shagnasty’s bartenders should have known her attacker “was or would become intoxicated,” and the bouncers should have kept her assailant in hand ’til cops arrived. The district court ruled there was no evidence Shagnasty’s sold or served beer, wine or intoxicating liquor to the unknown patron. The Iowa Courts of Appeals has ruled there was a “legitimate inference” that the unknown, beer-bottle-weilding woman was probably drunk, but no substantial evidence to back up the claim that Shagnasty bartenders were fibbing when they said they didn’t know who the woman was or whether they’d served her booze.
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