You Can't Make This Stuff Up, Either!

At the February 2023 Informal Common Council meeting, DPW Superintnedent Robert Perry gave his monthly report via Zoom, as he usually does.  He included a picture of an old dump truck parked on the 300 block of Columbia Street to once again make his point that when vehicles park for a long time in one spot, there is no way for the street sweeper to do its job properly.  He said this:  "Because this is on the truck route, this doesn't alternate [no alternate side rule forcing vehicles to switch sides every night].  What you see here is a beat-up old truck with a flat tire.  You can see the windrow of dirt and stuff because we are unable to get around it or maintain the area."  Of course, the DPW street sweeper doesn't operate in the colder months, a fact Mr. Perry failed to mention.

What Mr. Perry could have easily noticed about the truck if he had just looked a little closer when he took the picture in January, is that the registration on the truck expired in July of last year.  According to HPD Chief Ed Moore, any vehicle parked in Hudson without a valid registration is considered an abandoned vehicle and can be towed by the city. (See yesterday's article)

Instead of doing something about the abandoned, unregistered "old, beat-up truck with a flat tire," Mr. Perry took a picture of the truck and included it in his report to show us all how busy he had been that month.  He never thought to look and see if the beat-up old truck with a flat tire surrounded by months of debris -- a vehicle that had obviously been parked there a while -- actually had a valid registration, that just possibly it had been abandoned by its owner.  No, instead, all he did was to point out a vehicle in the way of his street sweeper that, had anyone looked, should have been towed away months ago.  This is what we pay Robert Perry more than $114,000 a year to do.  Oh, woe is he! 

Two months later, and the beat-up, old dump truck (sans flat tire) is in the exact same spot and still surrounded by debris.  Still in the way of DPW's street sweeper and snowplows, and still with an expired registration.  

Perhaps Mr. Perry doesn't know about the code related to unregistered vehicles.  Or, perhaps, he simply doesn't care about any of that, just as long as he gets a picture for his report to show how difficult things are for him out there on the streets and how busy he is.  How about you get the truck towed, Mr. Perry, as it should have been long ago?  Would that make things easier for you?

Still there, still unregistered, still
in Mr. Perry's way

Mr. Perry continued his report with a picture of snow in the street that couldn't be removed by his snowplows because, according to him, parked vehicles were in the way, something he regularly reminds us of.  He said this:  "The other thing with Alternate Side Parking is when cars don't move, you get crap like this.  The snow turns to rock hard ice pack."  (Unlike the picture of the dump truck, Mr. Perry failed to mention where this picture was taken)

Thanks to YouTube, one can examine the picture that Mr. Perry provided to make his point.  The photo was taken, without a doubt, directly in front of his own house on Prospect Avenue, located between Rossman and Warren.  Of course, since there is no car in the picture, it's difficult to know who had parked their car in front of Mr. Perry's house and supposedly been in the way of the snowplow.

Mr. Perry's implication was that the street he lives on, Prospect Avenue, has the Alternate Side Parking rule.  But Ed Moore told me the other day that Prospect Avenue, between Rossman and Warren, DID NOT have the Alternate Side Parking Rule, correcting his email to me on January 10th claiming that it DID have the rule. (See yesterday's article).

Mr. Perry complains about vehicles parked on the wrong side of the street during snowstorms, yet, as I have shown in two recent posts, HPD doesn't seem to ticket vehicles parked on the wrong side when it snows.  HPD doesn't ticket vehicles when they most need to be ticketed -- that is, during and after substantial snowfall when they are in the way of the DPW snowplows -- while the head of the DPW is complaining about parked vehicles in his snowplows' way.  No less on his own street that, depending on who you talk to, may or may not have the Alternate Side Parking Rule.

How on earth did Hudson City Hall devolve to this level of absurdity?  Or has it always been this incoherent?