How Much More Incompetency Can Hudson Survive?

 

This is the second broken plastic scannable paid parking sign in the 700 block of Columbia Street that I have come across since several were installed in the block less than two weeks ago on meter poles.  The pictured sign -- near 8th Street -- will need to be sent to a landfill and replaced with a new one, just like the broken, bent and useless plastic sign near Lucky's gas station that HUDseen featured five days ago and which was recently replaced with a new plastic sign.  There will come a time, possibly very soon, where someone with some common sense, basic awareness and smarts will sound the alarm at a Comon Council or so-called SAFETY COMMITTEE meeting to call out HPD on yet another of their embarrassing and bush league errors:  The scannable signs, regardless of the material they are made of, never should have been allowed to be attached to meter poles. NEVER!  It was an absolutely dumb idea, and it never should have even been entertained.  If you did this to save money, you should be shown the door.  What embarrassing, ridiculous problems and wasting of money and resources will we be dealing with next that we don't need to be dealing with thanks to decisions of yours that are obviously not properly considered ahead of time or with any sort of common sense and competency?  How is any of this acceptable in the year 2026 in a city that is constantly facing financial shortcomings?

As the delays, embarrassments and mistakes regarding the city's new paid parking system continue to pile up, you can't help but wonder how any of this is possible.  Here are two clues, both of them worth repeating here on HUDseen.  

First, 10 or 11 months ago at a Parking Study Committee meeting just a few months before the committee handed off all things paid parking to HPD, and with all sorts of plans and phases of the new paid parking system in place, head parking expert studier Jen Belton announced that she had discovered "many" on-street parking meters in the 600 block of Union Street across from the municipal parking lot that she had been unaware of.  "We're going to need kiosks there, too," she added.  The supposed chair of the Parking Study Committee had no clue about the ancient parking meters that were a stone's throw from the police station, and it's entirely likely that Tom Depietro, Dominic Merante (he's excused, I guess), Dewan Sarowar and any of the other parking clowns were equally clueless that there have been a handful of on-street parking meters on Union Street for, oh, just the past 40 years or so.  Can you imagine the idiocy and incompetency!  These people were given $400,000 to modernize our paid parking system and rid the city of "the tyranny of the quarter," a phrase Tom and Jen actually uttered to justify their efforts to increase parking revenue and save the city from bankruptcy while the person supposedly in charge had apparently never once walked on the north side of the 600 block of Union Street.  Clueless?  How about blind! 

Second, sometime last summer, longtime Police Clerk Doreen Danforth took on the role of, well, actually it's really difficult to say what role she assumed several months ago at the new Parking Bureau while continuing to be Mishanda Franklin's clerk.  (But there certainly can't be any question that she is being paid for whatever role she has been given at the bureau.)   Surely, then, her name can be readily found on the CITY OFFICIALS page of the city's website, where all departments are listed, right?  Sorry, you are WRONG!  The list of departments doesn't even include the Parking Bureau, so her name is not even on the CITY OFFICIALS page, including under HPD.  It is as if there is no Hudson Parking Bureau and never has been, let alone someone supervising it.  What about HPD's own page on the city's website?  There you will find Danforth's name referred to as Police Clerk/Parking Bureau, whatever the hell that means.  Hmmm... still no help. 

Surely, then, it's safe to say that Doreen Danforth was in attendance two weeks ago at the first meeting of the Margaret Morris's new SAFETY COMMITTEE to present to the committee's 4 members and Morris herself the latest revenue figures for the new paid parking system, right?  Sorry, WRONG again, dummy!  She was nowhere to be seen or heard from at that meeting!  Instead, that revenue report was given by HPD's second in command, Captain David C. Miller, Jr., with data that had to have come directly from the Parking Bureau and likely given to him by Danforth herself.

Okay, then, what about on the Parking Bureau's own lengthy page on the city's website, surely Doreen Danforth's name and title must be found there somewhere, right?  WRONG WRONG WRONG, AGAIN, pal!  It is as if no one, absolutely no one, is in charge of, supervising or overseeing the Parking Bureau.  And so, it can't come as a bit of a surprise or shock to anyone (at least those of us outside of City Hall and HPD) that broken and loose plastic parking signs are lining our sidewalks as the city tries its darndest to modernize our paid parking system as if our little old city with a struggling downtown commercial district just 6 or 7 blocks long is on par with Manhattan's or even Albany's.  

Look close enough beyond the ugly vacant storefront
and you will see a $10,000 parking kiosk that should accept 
 paper currency but does not. 6 or 7 months after that
kiosk was installed, the vintage store closed for good.

Ditto!

And the only explanation one can possibly come up with as to why a police captain rather than someone in charge of the Parking Bureau would be giving monthly revenue and general info updates to the common council's new SAFETY COMMITTEE regarding the city's grand new paid parking scheme is that the system is a complete dysfunctional and possibly corrupt mess.  Last Monday, following Captain Miller's rather lengthy time giving his report and answering questions from committee members and the public, not one SAFETY COMMITTEE member asked Miller or Chief Franklin why no one from the Parking Bureau was in attendance to answer questions, give the parking update and be accountable to everything that is going on with parking, especially all the delays and apparent difficulties with signs and kiosks.  Not one member asked Miller who he got his parking revenue data from or if he was collecting it himself.  Not one member asked Miller how much time he was spending on getting HPD's new parking system up and running and who is going to be responsible for its success in the next 10, 20 and 30 years.  Will it be anyone from the Parking Bureau?  By the way, what exactly is Doreen Danforth's role at the Parking Bureau that is under HPD's control?  Is she the bureau's supervisor, clerk, or just a bystander?  Why are you offering us data that the Parking Bureau is collecting?  Don't you have any crime to concern yourselves with anymore, Captain Miller and Chief Franklin?  How much time have you and will you both be spending on the new paid parking system you decided to take over last July?  And how much time will you continue to spend on it in the foreseeable future, including the mistakes, delays and need to replace plastic parking signs that are showing up all over the place?  By the way, why haven't you told us how much each one of those easily breakable scannable plastic parking signs are costing us, as well as how many of them you have bought and continue to plan on buying?  What one earth does any of this have to do with SAFETY and LAW ENFORCEMENT?

I'm no expert on organizational management and culture -- especially insular police culture, a whole different and complex ball of wax that is difficult to even approach from the outside -- but it seems to me that hiring a new face or two to better supervise a police force with as rich a history of corruption, dysfunction, misconduct and shenanigans as HPD has had for at least a century is a fool's errand.  Ed Moore was hired for just that purpose, but he is no longer around.  In very clear language, one of the last things he told the city -- warned the city! -- on his way out the door three years ago was essentially this:  KEEP PARKING OUT OF THE HANDS OF HPD.  LEAVE TICKETING TO THEM AND THAT IS IT!  Ed Moore saw what was headed HPD's way and he wanted none of it.  He knew full well that it wasn't right for HPD to be responsible for a new paid parking system.  Ed was smart enough to know that doing so was misguided and that it would be a huge mistake in the end.  His successor, however, just gobbled it all up without hesitation -- in part thanks to a paid parking consultant who told us it should happen -- as if she didn't hear a word Ed said to her and everyone else who was or should have been listening to him.  And so did our present second in command at HPD, someone who very easily could have been chosen to succeed Ed Moore, Captain David Miller, another parking expert and fan of plastic signs attached to the tops of parking meter poles, all of them waiting to be bent, broken and replaced over and over again until the city goes bankrupt with only incompetency to blame. 

Note:  After recently getting a close inspection of two scannable signs not attached to parking meter poles, it turns out that I was mistaken when I made the claim a few weeks ago that the scannable signs high up on streetlight poles are made of metal.  All of the scannable signs are made of plastic.  It appears that the parking experts at HPD (Captain David Miller, Chief Mishanda Franklin and/or Parking Bureau something-or-other Doreen Danforth) decided that it was in the city's best interest to have signs made of plastic rather than metal.  We all know why this decision was made:  "We need to save money.  This is getting too expensive.  We'll have to stick with plastic."  If someone can show me a posted traffic or parking sign anywhere in the entire city that is made of plastic besides the new scannable ones, I will eat my favorite winter wool hat and give you a dollar.  Let's save money and buy the cheap plastic crap.  It's not like we're buying stop signs.  And even if we have to constantly replace them, we will be saving money!  No one will notice.  It'll be fine!  

"No," says Captain Miller, "the signs will be GREAT!  Everything will be GREAT!  Just keep repeating after me!  It's all GREAT!"