HUDseen: It Never F'n Ends!

As they do every winter, DPW has recently been removing some of our public trash can receptacles to the DPW garage on Dock Street to give them the attention they deserve. The wooden slats are revarnished, as are the few wooden lids that remain. The more common and ugly black metal lids (how about pink, purple or red?!) are repainted to create a blank canvas for the local graffiti artists and sticker-crazed lunatics, some of whom still rail against Covid masks and the World Health Organization. Ho-hum.

Two wooden lids in the 600 block of Warren were cleared of stickers and graffiti and revarnished by DPW no more than 4 weeks ago. Back on the sidewalk and looking respectable once again, the lids were quickly tagged, apparently by the same person. More paint will soon follow, as will the lovely and informative stickers. Like all the other lids in town that are vandalized, the vandalism on these two lids will accumulate and remain for the entire year or longer until DPW gets around to once again maintaining them. (DPW does not maintain every receptacle annually -- there are far too many to get to all of them every winter.)

What about the lid for the receptacle on Columbia Street at Park Place that has had the word FUCK so clearly painted on the lid for the past several months? Surely that should have been one of the first receptacles -- if not the first -- to be maintained this year. Why the f*%# wouldn't it have been? (A few years ago, I was told by a DPW employee that Robert Perry, our DPW Superintendent with a salary over $115,000, has quite the potty mouth! Who knows, maybe he gets a kick out of f-bombs and other vulgar graffiti remaining on public property for years. He probably thinks it's f'n hilarious.)