More Self-Inflicted Damage And Lost Revenue At City Hall. Is Anyone Doing Anything To Put An End To It?

Today: Lights on, blue car with flat tire 
still there and one fourth of the meters inoperable.
Oh, and the lot is a mess, including overgrown weeds.

I recently noticed that the parking meters in the City Hall Municipal Parking Lot on Columbia Street were looking ignored, so this morning I decided to count the number of inoperable meters, something I hadn't done in many months.

There are currently 98 parking meters in the lot, down from a high of 120 a few years ago as permit spaces have increasingly replaced metered spaces.  Today, I found at least 23 of those 98 meters to be inoperable, with many or all of them requiring maintenance for the past several weeks or months. 18 of the meters were blank (likely due to a dead 9-volt battery), 2 of them were flashing DEAD and 3 were flashing FAIL.  2 of the 18 blank meters have been wrapped in blue tape for well over a year.  At the start of the 2024 summer, nearly one out of four meters (23.5%) in the city's largest and busiest parking lot are out of service.  

Another clear indication that no one is 
steering the ship!

A broken meter either won't accept quarters (jammed) or it won't allow time to be displayed on the meter.  Also, a car parked in a metered space with a broken meter cannot be issued a $10 meter violation ticket by a HPD parking enforcer or a HPD police officer, a larger source of revenue from our metered spaces than the quarters put into the meters.  An inoperable parking meter, it goes without saying, is a revenue loser.  Short of certain exceptions, free parking in metered spaces is to be AVOIDED!  Our metered parking spaces have real daily value, but you wouldn't know it from the way many of our meters are ignored and neglected. 

(In June of last year, the results of a HUDseen parking meter assessment resulted in similar findings.  Read about it here:  missing meters)

The blue car shown in the pictures has been parked in the lot unmoved since at least December.  While it does have a City Hall-issued parking permit (issued by the City Clerk's Office), it has also had a flat tire for at least 5 months, it has Maine license plates, it is full of junk and it is occupying a metered parking space with a meter that is not broken and has not been able to be filled by a visitor for over 5 months.

Today at 9 am, all the lights in the lot that aren't burnt out were on.  A few days ago, I noticed that those lights were on at about noon on a cloudless day.

Our City Clerk is the person who handles matters related to meter maintenance (primarily ordering meters and parts), but she does not work for the Parking Bureau.  There is a part-time employee who does the actual maintenance of the meters (or at least there was until recently!) as an employe of the Parking Bureau.  Among the list of departments on the DEPARTMENTS page of the city's website is the Parking Bureau.  On the window of the main entrance door to City Hall is a list of the departments found on the first floor.  One of those departments is the Parking Ticket Bureau.  Presumably, those two "departments" are one and the same.  And on the city's CITY OFFICIALS page is an incomplete list of all departments and contact info for the department heads.  Can you guess which department is not on the list?  This is probably not a mistake, since there is no one who can be considered the head of the Parking Bureau.

About 6 weeks ago, I noticed a pair of parking meters on a pole in the 700 block of Columbia Street that were very ready to fall over and slam to the concrete, asphalt or something in the way.  Strangely, the base of the metal pole holding the meters was almost entirely cut just above the concrete of the sidewalk, allowing anyone to easily push the pole and meters over into the street, intentionally or not.  Somehow, no parking enforcers noticed this.  One push with one hand by even an 8-year-old would have allowed the heavy and heavy-duty pole to separate and the meters to come crashing down (they are also quite heavy).

This picture of the damaged meter pole 
was taken at least 6 weeks before it fell.

I sent emails with pictures of the unsecured pole to the City Clerk, the Police Chief, the Mayor's Office and the Parking Bureau warning them that unless someone removed the pole and meters, they were going to hit the ground very soon, possibly striking a car, human or a pet and the meters possibly breaking apart or being stolen.  A few weeks later in City Hall, on Friday, May 3rd, I spoke with City Clerk Tracy Delaney about the broken meter pole.  She told me that she was aware of the situation from my emails and that she had made DPW aware of the situation as well, explaining that the removal of the pole and meters was outside the scope of the meter maintainer's duties.  Tracy added that DPW had told her that they were busy with Colarusso's street paving and would get to the meter pole when they had a chance.  That was three weeks ago.  Early last week, I noticed that someone from DPW had spray painted near the meter pole in preparation of digging to install a new pole (not to remove the pole!).  It would have taken one person two minutes to remove the pole and meters BY HAND and put them in a vehicle to be taken away.  Instead, someone at DPW spray painted the pavement.  They were there, having arrived with their spray paint by vehicle, of course!

The DIG SAFE letters arrived days
BEFORE the meters fell!

Early on Saturday evening, in the middle of the Memorial Day weekend, I noticed that the pole and the two meters were lying on the sidewalk.  I got the attention of two HPD officers nearby at Speedway, and, as you can imagine, they were truly puzzled, even after I tried my best to explain.  Officer Strattman then picked up the meters still attached to the pole and, with quarters rattling, walked them down the street and placed it all in the trunk of his HPD vehicle.  The officers never would have noticed the fallen meters then had I not informed them. 

With the coordination of a ballet, HPD 
doing DPW's work on Saturday night.

A few blocks away and also very recently, there can be no doubt about how the parking meter pole near the Spotty Dog was bent.  The question is, though, what happened to the meters, how long will it take to replace the pole and the meters and, lastly, which department will force the responsible party to pay for the damages?  Will it be the Parking Violations Department, the Police Department, the Department of Public Works, the Parking Department or the City Clerk's Office?  Or none of the above?

This painters lift has been parked on 
Warren for at least two weeks with no 
posted HPD parking permit to be found

Picture taken a week or two prior to the 
damage to the meters and pole.  Notice what
lies just beyond the meters, waiting to bend
the pole and knock the meters off the pole! 

A few months ago, I noticed that one of the two parking meter kiosks for the city's Amtrak parking lot was gone. According to Tracy Delaney during March's Parking Study Committee meeting, the base of that kiosk was in such horrible, rusted and unstable condition that the entire thing was at risk of falling over (sound familiar?). Apparently, there was no alternative but to scrap the whole unit as it was unrepairable. "DPW came and removed it so that no one would get hurt," she noted. Tracy, in her capacity as the quasi-supervisor of parking maintenance in the City Clerk's office, then offered a reason that the kiosk had to go, saying that "we think the kiosk was about ten years old." Unsurprisingly, no one had been doing any maintenance of the kiosks to make sure they wouldn't decay to the point of uselessness within just ten years. No one was responsible for maintaining them or even keeping an eye on them because there was no one at City Hall who held that responsibility. You get what you ask for. The kiosks always looked like crap to me, as did (and still does) the structure protecting the kiosks from the elements.

Just one kiosk remains

Months after the kiosk's removal, there are 
still 4 rusty bolts sticking out of the concrete

The parking consultant hired by the city over a year ago to help us improve parking matters (and meters) had something interesting to say regarding when, so to speak, too many cooks are in the kitchen.  At his presentation last February in front of our uninterested and completely distracted-by-his-phone so-called mayor, I heard the consultant say this:  "When everyone is responsible, no one is responsible."  Anyone familiar with organizational hierarchy or human nature knows this to be a truism.  

So, exactly what were the consultant's specific recommendations to help us avoid the several issues directly and indirectly related to parking matters resulting from a poorly organized/unorganized/structurally flawed City Hall?  Here are the first two of five recommendations found in his report:  1) There must be a leader committed to operational excellence and future planning.  2)  A functioning Parking Bureau or Authority should strive to be financially self-sufficient.  The city paid tens of thousands of dollars to be told this.

We also paid Fishbeck Consultants to be told the following, found in the lengthy report still available on the city's website:  "Someone has to hold the system accountable for overall performance.  This includes Staffing, Enforcment, Financial Management, Facility and Equipment Maintenance, Managing Supply and Planning for Future Needs."  Otherwise, the implication is that City Hall will continue to chase its own tail, make the same mistakes over and over and continue to waste and lose out on money like it is water spilling out of a sieve.  And never progress toward the goal we all know needs to be reached.

In the 15 months since the parking consultant's report was released, I have not heard one peep from the Common Council's Parking Study Committee about creating a Parking Department that would make the consultant proud.  Not one word at all.  They talk a lot about implementing a fancy new hi-tech meter system free of coins -- including adding metered spaces on Warren Street all the way to Front Street -- but they don't feel the need to plan for the person or people who will make all these necessary changes happen and keep them functioning properly, efficiently and profitably well into the future.  Maybe Tom Depietro and Margaret Morris have decided that somehow they will take care of it themselves.  Or, more likely, maybe they think it will all magically happen on its own with some help from the City Clerk when she has time.

Jeez, don't get me started!