One Hundred And Thirty Nine Thousand Dollars In Taxpayer Revenue Has Been Gathering Dust (And Possibly Mold) In A Shed On Dock Street For The Past 4 Months!

There has been $139,000 worth of parking kiosks and associated gadgets in a storage shed at the DPW garage on Dock Street for the past four months waiting to be installed on Warren Street sidewalks and in city-owned parking lots.  The much lauded kiosks won't leave that shed anytime soon, and I would bet anyone two hundred dollars that not one kiosk gets put in the ground and turned on this year.  A city as steeped in dysfunction as Hudson is never should have taken this project on.  We don't even have a proper Parking Bureau with a Parking Supervisor, two goals which the committee hopes to achieve by "creating and raising revenue" with the parking kiosks, presumably with them installed in the ground for use, not in storage on Dock Street.  The ridiculously titled Parking Study Committee (stop studying and do something!) has put their cart before their horse.

(From what I can gather, $139,000 got us 16 kiosks -- a cost of a little less than $10,000 apiece.)

Phase one and two of the kiosk project, which the 16 stored kiosks are intended for, were both supposed to be started and completed in the "spring of 2025," according to the Parking Study Committee's Parking Plan Working Document.  The committee is hoping that phase three, which will require additional kiosks, will begin and end in the "summer of 2025."  It's all laughable.  This is one of the city's largest infrastructure projects ever, and it is being "managed" by a council member (Belton) who may not return to the council and City Hall next year.

Their highlighted announcement was added to the document
for the meeting in March.

Jen Belton and Tom Depietro (strangely, as if he ordered the machines, Tom's name is included in the Bill To and Send To addresses on the invoice from the kiosk company*!) went ahead and purchased $139,000 worth of high-tech parking payment kiosks without actually being anywhere near prepared to have any of them put in the ground.  They are like children playing with our money.  Play money.  And all the while they whine about the "tyranny of the quarter"!

Here is the invoice from Integrated Technical Systems for our 16 new-but-getting-old-and-obsolete-by-the-day kiosks. Strangely, there are no individual prices for each of the many items, just a total for them all.  Among the many items, there are 16 rolls of "thermal paper," all of them stored in a shed on Dock Street for the past four months.  That would be the receipt paper for the kiosks when they are in the ground and operating.

I believe the 16 kiosks worth $139,000 are in this shed,
waiting patiently for the past four months to be useful
and make Hudson great again.  16 rolls of thermal paper 
are also waiting in there.

So classy!

Tyrannical meters, no longer a fit for Hudson!
When the city starts yanking meters out of the 
concrete, they had better be sure they are ready 
with the kiosks.   

*The company behind the $139,000 invoice, Integrated Technical Systems, Inc. (aka ITS, referred to in the Parking Plan Working Document as "Integrated Technical Solutions"), does not manufacture its own parking payment kiosks.  ITS sold us 16 "Luke Cosmo" kiosks manufactured by a company called T2 Systems out of Indianapolis, Indiana.  With that purchase, apparently, ITS will service our kiosks, installing and repairing them.  For that service, the city will be billed $1,500 per month.  I do not know if that fee has been implemented since the T2 kiosks we bought from ITS arrived on Dock Street on February 4th.  $1,500 is the equivalent of just 150 ten-dollar parking meter violation tickets.

Final note:  Police Chief Mishanda Franklin has been very involved with the Parking Study Committee, including attending the committee's monthly meetings (which have little to nothing to do with law enforcement, of course), getting the new Parking Bureau office built inside the HPD station at 701 Union Street, and ensuring that all things parking are handled by HPD.  According to a recent posting on HPD's Fakebook page, our police chief is pregnant with her second child.