Some people in South Bend didn’t have the utilities they needed this past winter, but now a settlement agreement has been reached.

The Portage Township Trustees and the owners of Cedar Glen settled for a little more than $10,000 in restitution for those residents who dealt with that hardship.

Tenants of Cedar Glen can now form their own tenant association.

Portage Township Trustee Jason Critchlow said he will be monitoring the situation to make sure all parties of the agreement follow through on the deal.

“Winter is coming, and that will be the true test, right, so we will be watching this very closely as winter arrives to make sure that Cedar Glen upholds to their commitments under this compliance agreement,” said Critchlow in a Tuesday news conference.

Critchlow said it was important to send a message here.

“We wanted to make sure that we shook a big stick on this issue. We had to win here to send a message to those other apartment complexes and a lot of other places that a lot of us can name that we’re watching. And we will do the same thing there if we need to and now we have an avenue to do it and now we were successful we have a proven successful model to follow here,” said Critchlow.

Todd Bogunia was also at the Tuesday news conference. He’s the newly appointed President of the Cedar Glen Tenant Association. He said he’s lived through a difficult two year period.

“Fourteen months grand total and two winters in a row with no heat and hot water, and even when the heat and hot water got fixed early on in January, my plumbing didn’t work for three months. I had two my children that lived with me, my daughter had to move out,” said Bogunia.

Cedar Glen has hired a new property management group and they say upgrades have been made to make sure the appropriate utilities are working properly.