What A Croc!

As I made quick mention of in an article on July 7th, National Grid is preparing to replace their natural gas lines along Green Street and elsewhere.  This morning, at the intersections of Columbia, Green, and State Streets, I noticed employees from National Grid and at least two of their contractors having a confab with DPW Superintendent Robert Perry.  

If 7 workers from two contractors and a utility get together with Mr. Perry to walk up and down city streets discussing matters and pointing to all sorts of things, you know that a large project is imminent.  Green Street, part of our notorious truck route, will have much of its asphalt dug up and then replaced, hopefully properly and quickly.  Mr. Perry has not made mention of this project at any recent Common Council meetings. (Nor has he mentioned National Grid's slow-as-molasses pipe project on the 200 block of State Street which started 4 or 5 weeks ago and has several weeks to go.)

For me, it was a rare sighting of our DPW Superintendent not in his city vehicle, so I couldn't help but take a picture of him in action.  Mr. Perry is the one in the white polo shirt, light blue slacks, and plastic blue cloggy sandal things, probably made by Crocs.  Our DPW Superintendent, with a salary of over $115,000, wears plastic clogs while on the job, even while he is in the public sphere and wearing otherwise respectable clothing.  Crocs and slacks?  Really?  

At a recent Council meeting, Mr. Perry let us all know that his department had repainted white parking space lines all over the city's commercial district, most of which were long overdue for new paint.  This work took place in early or mid-June, I believe.  DPW even repainted the space lines on the 700 block of Columbia, which I noticed 2 years ago were in need of paint since they were all nearly faded to nothing.  Those lines should have been repainted 4 or 5 years ago.  In typical DPW "whatever" fashion, and as you can see in the pictures, DPW repainted some lines and failed to do others IN THE SAME BLOCK.  

Look! Visible white lines on 
Columbia Street!

8 out of 9 ain't bad!

Why bother with these 8 lines?
What does it matter?  

What parking space line?

All 20 of the white parking space lines in the upper half of the block were repainted, while all 8 of the faded or non-existent parking space lines along the south side of the lower half of the block were ignored.  Not one those 8 lines was repainted.  This is what I would call sloppy, unprofessional work. 

Meanwhile, directly across the street on the north side of Columbia, DPW found the time and manpower to repaint 8 of the 9 faded lines.  Somehow they failed to see one of those lines (it was faded, but not completely), it being the one in the middle of them all!  More sloppy work.

How would Mr. Perry explain his department's sloppy, uneven work if someone were to even have the opportunity to ask him how and why so many well-faded or non-existent parking space lines were ignored?  Does he or his foreman ever check over the DPW crews' work to make sure they have done a proper and complete job?  Obviously not.  For that, Mr. Perry might get his special Crocs work shoes dirty.  And, of course, he'll need an increase in salary to pay attention to the simple tasks that he has his workers performing.