A Saint John, N.B. man has reached local hero status after a blown tire led to a blowout with the city because the auto body shop owner decided to fix potholes on his street, only to be told to undo the work or face a fine.

Three weeks ago, Mike Defazio blew out a tire after hitting a foot-deep pothole on Broadway Avenue at Simpson Drive, where he owns an auto body shop. The next day, while working outside his shop, he watched a hearse try to navigate around the pothole on the way to a funeral and the 60-year-old decided to take matters into his own hands.

“Enough is enough. Between me blowing a tire and having to watch a hearse do that, I took my little Kubota tractor and took some fill from my yard and poured it in the hole,” he told the Post. “I spent all morning, about three-and-a-half hours…I filled in numerous potholes.”

And from the way Defazio describes the potholes, they weren’t just run-of-the-mill road ruiners, they were Gotham City-sized super villains.

“Some of them were 10 to 12 inches wide, a [foot] deep and two feet long,” he said. “I just drew the line and filled them in. I didn’t think I was doing anything wrong.

“But obviously, the city down here thinks I was.”

Some of them were 10 to 12 inches wide, a feet deep and two feet long

The city says that this might be a case where the cure is worse than the disease, as it began receiving complaints about the gravel used by Defazio, which was too large and could damage cars.

The city’s deputy commissioner of transportation and environment services, Kevin Rice, told the Post that while Defazio’s heart was in the right place, he broke a city bylaw that says private citizens cannot modify city roads.

“With respect to Mr. Defazio, his intentions were well-meaning and he undertook actions on his own to fill potholes either out of frustration or perception of a lack of action and he put a lot of gravel on the road,” Rice said. “The problem with that is he filled a thick layer of gravel over the asphalt surface and what happens then [is that] I began to receive complaints from the public.”

On Wednesday, nearly three weeks after Defazio cleaned up Broadway, he received an unpleasant phone call from Rice.

“He said I broke a city bylaw, that I’m not supposed to be doing that,” Defazio said of the call. “He ragged me out like I’m some little kid.”

Defazio said he was told the city was going to send a crew out to the street, undo the work he did and send him the bill for it. Rice told him that there were complaints about the gravel used and possible insurance issues as cars could be damaged by the flying rocks.

“I said, ‘Tell you what, you send out all the crews you can send out and you send me all the bills you can send me, I couldn’t care less,’” he said. “Anyway, [Rice] hung the phone up when I said that.”

Defazio then contacted a local contractor to clean up the street, and was later told by Rice that it would be OK if he did that.

“I told him everything, all the rocks, all the potholes, could go back to the way it was three weeks ago and he said ‘That’s what we want,’” Defazio said.

Rice said that the city prioritizes potholes depending on how well-used the roads are and Broadway Avenue falls into the lowest priority category, which the city gives itself 30 days to fix.

He also said that the city has not yet received a complaint about Broadway Avenue when Defazio took it upon himself to fix the potholes.

Defazio paid about $450 to the contractor to undo the work he did.

He said a received a call from a city councillor this morning that was sympathetic to his plight.

“The city is now leaving me alone, they want nothing more to do with me, they apologized, the whole bit,” Defazio said.

“The outpouring from the people of Saint John that I got is unreal. Hundreds and hundreds. This phone hasn’t stopped.

“It’s gone right crazy.”

Rice says this winter was particularly onerous on the roads of Saint John, which has a great deal more urban sprawl per resident than most Canadian cities, and the city is working to keep up.

He says he has ordered city crews to go to Broadway Avenue on Monday.

“However, there’s an opportunity cost to that and that means some higher-priority potholes and higher-priority roads will not get done,” Rice said.