(Note: This article was essentially completed yesterday, with some final editing to be made before publishing. The title was changed to reflect discussions at the end of last night's Common Council meeting which had confirmed what I had written about hours earlier. I'm not a seer; I just pay attention.)
We should all be concerned with the lack of progress and confusion regarding the city's planned rollout of parking kiosks. Concerned, but not surprised.
Nearly two months after Jen Belton announced to the Common Council how excited she was to have received the first order of new parking kiosks, she voiced a concern at the March 25th meeting of the Parking Study Ad-Hoc Committee, which she is the head of. Jen was speaking to committee members Dewan Sarowar (on Zoom), Dominic Merante and Tom Depietro, as well as HPD Chief Franklin (!), HPD Clerk Doreen Danforth (!) and the newly hired parking consultant, Kevin Wood, but she should have been directing her comment only to DPW Superintendent Rob Perry, who, of course, was not present in the room nor on Zoom. (Committee member Rony was not in attendance.)
Belton: The one thing that I would really like to see happen is the lot on Warren Street, the short-term lot, the one next to Moto, is a disaster. It's underutilized because people don't want to wreck their cars going in there. I'd really like to see that fixed, because we are putting in all this effort to this project and that is a mess. It's embarrassing.
Then Tom Depietro had this suggestion: I think the best thing to do is ask Rob what it would cost to upgrade that lot.
Jen Belton finished with this: Okay.
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| Patching is no longer an option to make this lot decent, and redoing the entire thing is beyond DPW's abilities and capabilities. The city will have to hire a paving contractor, likely Colarusso, and it would cost at least $15,000. There is no way this will take place this year. NOT A CHANCE! |
Great idea, Jen and Tom, you really are planning ahead like professionals. Buy the kiosks, put them in storage AND THEN wait a few months to see if DPW Superintendent Rob Perry has the time, money or interest in replacing (or hiring a paving contractor to replace) the entire surface of a parking lot in horrible condition so that you can install a kiosk or two in the lot. For how long have you known that the Moto lot is "a disaster" and "embarrassing"? Did you just notice its deplorable condition last month?
Two years ago (give or take), appalled at the condition of the surface of the MOTO lot, I asked the DPW Foreman, Ron Van Benschoten, what the deal was with the lot. Without hesitation, he said, "The whole thing needs to be redone." If Ron knew the lot needed a new surface, his boss, Rob Perry, must have known about it as well. Hell, they both probably knew the lot needed to be redone 4 or 5 years ago! There isn't one parking space line left in the 20-plus space lot, and the entire lot is a patched, crumbling, insulting mess. It is as if DPW completely gave up on the lot years ago, with no intention of ever improving it. Do you ever hear Rob Perry mentioning anything about the condition of that lot at council meetings, a plan about it, or requesting money to have it completely redone as he knows it needs to be? Of course not, he's too busy ordering thousand-dollar trash cans for the sidewalks of Warren Street! There is no coherent or sensible plan for much of anything coming from DPW!
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| Hurry up and order some more kiosks, these meters were hiding in plain sight! The head of the kiosk project was unaware of them until a few weeks ago! |
Jen Belton, our apparent parking guru council member, also had this to say at the most recent Parking Study Committee meeting. "I don't know if anybody realizes this, but as I was driving around today [laughing], there are a lot of Union Street meters. Are they in working order or are they..."
Someone in the room interrupts Jen, probably Tom The Interrupter: "Yeah."
Belton: "Okay. So, we also need kiosks there."
Actually, if Belton had gotten out of her car, she may have realized that there are not "a lot" of parking meters on Union Street. Yes, there are a lot of them in the Union Street Municipal Parking Lot, but across the street from the lot there are exactly 8 metered parking spaces lining the curb. Replacing those 8 parking meters should not require multiple kiosks (at least I hope not). One should suffice. Add it to the plan!
The person leading the city's huge parking kiosk system project, a resident of the fourth ward, had no idea those meters in the first ward existed until the end of last month. Jen Belton's realization was made two months after the kiosks she order had arrived, and 13 months after she attended her first parking committee meeting where the discussion of a new parking meter system for Hudson was in its infancy. Belton was not a council member when the new parking meter plan first began in late 2023, and she may not be around to see the plan (much of which she has molded) become a reality. (That is, of course, if the kiosks ever materialize into something we can all be proud of). Those kiosks, by the way, have been gathering dust in a DPW garage on Dock Street for the past two months, having arrived the first week of February. If the committee waits much longer, the technology in those expensive kiosks will be obsolete and they will have to be sent back to the manufacturer or delivered to a landfill.
We have 5 council members -- at least two of them completely worthless ones (if they even bother showing up to the monthly meetings) -- handling one of the largest infrastructure projects the city has seen in decades. FIVE MOSTLY OR COMPLETELY UNQUALIFIED COUNCIL MEMBERS WITH LITTLE TO NO SPARE TIME, OR REASON TO MAKE TIME, INCLUDING THE PERSON LEADING THE EFFORT AND MAKING THE DECISIONS WHO MAY NOT BE REELECTED TO THE COUNCIL IN 6 MONTHS! One of the questionably useful members of the Parking Study Ad-Hoc Committee (don't you love the name!), Dominic Merante, is nearly completely blind. But there's no need to worry about Dominic not being around next year to see this project succeed -- he is running unopposed for another two-year term on the council. Oh, joy! Maybe he will take over for Jen if she doesn't get reelected!
This is insanity; it is no way to try to run a city! This project is far too ambitious for any members of the council to be dealing with -- they didn't sign up for this crap. The project will fail miserably no matter who shows up next year to handle it! The entire structure within which these people are working is FLAWED BY DESIGN, just the way Hudson City Hall seems to like it! I have no doubt that Jen Belton is doing the best she can, but she simply can't do this on her own, and certainly not if Rob Perry is impossible to communicate with or isn't interested in helping.
(NOTE: What Jen Belton discussed with the council toward the end of the meeting confirmed the point made here: the cracks are already starting to show! Jen, looking and sounding concerned and dejected, had words of caution for her fellow council members about the rollout of the kiosks. The excitement she showed after the arrival of the new kiosks was completely gone. Among her concerns last night was this: "What we are doing is moving a little too rapidly and haphazardly... there are a lot of moving parts to this, and I think we need to take a more wholistic look; take a step back."
I wouldn't be at all surprised if not one kiosk gets put in the ground this year, nor would I be surprised if one day soon Belton announces that she has no more time or interest in dealing with this project. She simply doesn't have the support she needs. She is not being paid to do this work -- she doesn't even have to do it.
Do you realize the enormous scope of this project, which this committee of council members and a parking consultant hope to have completed by the end of this summer? Every single parking meter in town, including their poles -- on streets and in the four downtown parking lots -- is to be removed and kiosks are to be installed by DPW. (As an example, the Union Street lot, which currently has about 30 metered spaces, is scheduled to get 2 kiosks this spring!) The City Hall lot alone has 100 meters (and the surfaces of that lot are a dismal mess as well)! There are probably close to 400 meters in the entire city. Also, our panacea parking kiosks are to be installed on a few blocks at each end of Warren Street. While the kiosks are equipped with solar panels, they still need to be wired for electricity underground for the times when the sum does not reach them! Signs for the kiosks need to go up! Lots of them! A letter to residents and businesses informing them of the kiosks and fee changes is in the plans! A new Parking Supervisor needs to be trained! Parking enforcer's approach to ticketing cars will change! The list goes on and on.
Then there is this:
During Belton's address to the council last night, she pointed out that Rob Perry had just indicated in his DPW report that Luizzi's DRI sidewalk work at 2nd & Warren was in the way of the kiosk roll out. She said this: "Looking at the thing tonight from DPW, now we see that the sidewalks in the first area we were going to start with things are not even going to be finished until June." In other words, Belton had just been indirectly informed by Rob Perry (on Zoom, as always) that Luizzi's work was going to set her kiosk schedule back by at least a few months. This is almost comical, but quite sad and concerning for any resident of Hudson wondering how city revenue is spent and what the common council spends its time doing. Again, it all comes back to a point HUDseen regualry shows evidence of: IT IS AS IF NO ONE AT CITY HALL TALKS TO ONE ANOTHER!
There is obviously no communication between the head of DPW and the head of the committee trying its best to completely change the city's parking payment system and infrastructure. This lack of communication alone is crippling this overly ambitious project. Tom Depietro and Jen Belton want to have DPW "upgrade" the MOTO lot so that DPW can yank all the meters and poles out of the ground and install a few kiosks in a respectable parking lot, all of this done by the end of this summer? Are you fucking kidding me? Perry made no mention of the MOTO lot during his DPW report last night, even though two weeks ago Jen Belton agreed that she would reach out to him to see about getting the lot improved for the kiosks headed its way this summer.
Absolutely none of this dysfunction and "haphazard" work now put on hold should come as a surprise to anyone paying attention! It had to happen.
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