Yesterday, HUDseen noticed a third broken or missing very new plastic paid parking sign needing replacement atop an ancient parking meter pole. Two days ago, I noticed that the sign -- in front of a business on Park Place -- was badly bent and leaning back, more so than it had been when I took a picture of it two weeks ago. Closer inspection showed that the plastic sign was also badly cracked, though I was not able to take a picture of it.
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| February 21st, already leaning. Installed in early February. Gone by March. |
24 hours later, just a few weeks after it was installed by DPW, nearly all of the plastic sign was gone, with just a sliver still attached to the bracket. I expected to find the broken off portion of the sign nearby on the sidewalk or in the street, but perhaps someone took it home as a souvenir. A souvenir of a failed, poorly planned and obscenely wasteful new paid parking system coming out of the Hudson Police Department. Someday at a council meeting, if we're lucky, someone will hold up one of the hundreds of plastic paid parking signs the city purchased and installed, showing how badly worn, damaged and cracked it is, saying in disgust, "What on earth were they thinking? How much did they spend on this crap? Who one earth approved this?"
During the HPD portion of last night's chaotic snoozefest of a SAFETY Committee meeting full of evasive answers and wasted words, nearly all the time being spent on parking issues -- not parking safety issues, mind you, but just general parking issues -- Mishanda Franklin, our Police Chief, apparently doubling as parking guru along with HPD's second in command, Captain David Miller, told the SAFETY Committee that more parking signs were on the way. But neither she nor Captain Miller mentioned anything about issues related to their plastic scannable paid parking signs on top of meter poles that are regularly turning up broken or missing.
Who knows, maybe it's because their plastic parking signs have nothing to do with the issue of safety and the SAFETY Committee doesn't want to hear about it!
Captain Miller, however, was kind of enough to inform the SAFETY Committee that parking revenue was up 26% last month from a year ago. Then, without any context, he said this: "And just to kind of put it in perspective for parking, we had 16,793 parking transactions for one month, and right now we have 43 tickets in dispute from last month only." (What a "parking transaction" may be is anyone's guess.)
Here is my story of what might be one of those 43 "disputes," also known as appeals. On or about January 2nd of this year, at the new Parking Bureau office at the police station, I submitted my handwritten appeal of a $15 overnight parking ticket that my car had been issued by HPD in the early morning hours of December 2nd. About a month ago I asked the Parking Clerk what the status of my appealed ticket was, and I was told that it was still "in process." One month later, I have still not received anything from the Parking Bureau regarding my appeal of that ticket issued three months ago. My guess is that the Parking Bureau has received a shit ton of appeals/disputes of $10 "meter"/kiosk/app parking tickets -- perhaps many more than Miller is letting on -- since the new poorly signed, poorly implemented and confusing on-street parking payment system along both sides of all 9 blocks of Warren Street and elsewhere got into partial swing beginning one month ago. And, as I understand the appeal process, all appealed tickets go directly to the city attorney to be decided. No city attorney (is it still Andy Howard?) or Parking Bureau employee (there are two) was present at last night's SAFETY Committee meeting to give the committee members and the public a true sense of what is going with the delay and backlog of ticket appeals/disputes, such as: how much time they are spending on the appeals, how many more appeals are they dealing with, how many appeals are being received and resolved on a daily, weekly and monthly basis, how much the city attorney's time spent on ticket appeals is costing the city, why there is a difficulty getting through the appeals, whether the system of appeal/dispute needs to be changed, how many disputed tickets from last year are still waiting to be resolved, and, finally and perhaps most importantly, why the second in command at HPD is offering the Common Council SAFETY Committee parking revenue and ticket data but the committee never hears a peep out of anyone from the Parking Bureau. For any parking information, it's HPD's top brass we must rely on, a task that I am almost certain is not in their job descriptions.
Our Police Chief's very brief monthly HPD report during last night's SAFETY Committee meeting, covering both January and February, had nothing to do with safety issues and gave no one any sense that any crime or quality of life issues exist in Hudson. Unsurprisingly, mainly because her brief reports don't leave time for much of anything, Mishanda failed to mention one word about any of the following crime and quality of life issues the city has experienced and that her department has responded to so far this year, all of which are listed on HPD's own monthly Incident Reports. Here is a partial list of the types of incidents that HPD continually responds to and that continually go unmentioned at council meetings past and present by recent and present head law enforcement officials. Are you ready?
Assault, robbery, burglary, child endangerment, animal cruelty, detective investigations, fraud, trespassing, larceny (21 in July of last year), larceny of motor vehicle, dog complaint, animal cruelty (2 in July) disorderly conduct, domestic dispute (20 in July), employee injury, fireworks (14 in July), harassment, noise complaint, person with a gun, neighborhood trouble, off truck route, parking complaints, remove persons, sex crimes, sex offender registration, threats, vehicle and traffic complaint, vandalism/criminal mischief, remove person (20 in July of last year alone!), garbage complaints and, last but not least, internal investigations (none in July). * Not one of these issues ("incidents") has been broached during either of the two SAFETY Committee meetings. One wonders if each member of the SAFETY Committee is handed a paper copy of the latest HPD monthly incident report when they arrive to the meetings. One wonders if any of them care about any of the issues on the reports that reflect how safe the city is and what types of crime, quality of life issues and bad behavior our police department is spending their time responding to and possibly addressing and attempting to prevent.
Following her brief reports lacking any mention of safety or quality of life issues we all experience on a daily basis, when things focused solely on parking matters, Chief Franklin did find the time and make the effort to respond in detail for more than four minutes to a concerned upper Warren Street resident who showed up to City Hall to voice her frustrations and ask several questions about HPD's new parking payment system she is not happy about. In fact, the police chief's responses to the resident's very relevant questions and concerns about parking lasted longer than her two monthly HPD reports combined did -- by about a minute or two! This was one of her responses that really had nothing to do with the resident's concerns or questions (particularly the last sentence): "We have more signs to put up for the new parking rules with the QR codes and the information. The time frame that those get put are dictated by DPW's schedule. We don't put those up. It's when if they're not busy with water breaks or different things, they take their extra time to put those up throughout the city. So, because there has been a delay, we delayed enforcement in areas where there weren't actually parking signs."
Everybody got that? Are we all on the same page now? No time for crime or law enforcement to make Hudson a SAFE and less dangerous city, because there's too much work to do with parking signs, kiosks, apps and tickets, including appeals and disputes of tickets that HPD decided to take on last July. If you have issues with HPD's new paid parking system or there are delays in parking enforcement, HPD can't help you. It's DPW's fault, not HPD's! DPW is busy dealing with their water breaks and other important matters. Let the public and Margaret Morris's new SAFETY Committee know all about it.
It's all so charming and encouraging, isn't it?
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| You can see the remains of the plastic sign in the bracket |
* There is currently no such thing as a local, independent police review board to be made aware of and investigate officer misconduct or corruption at the Hudson Police Department, a department with a long, long history of corruption and malfeasance. And, as far as I know, there never has been such a review board, though the State Police (and Ed Moore) were called in to root out the rot. As Mishanda Franklin clearly conveyed at last night's meeting by failing to answer a question of mine on the issue of a lack of a local, independent police review board in Hudson (at 48:45 of the meeting), she is perfectly fine with only HPD investigating its own officers and, as a result, keeping as many people as possible in the dark about the results of all their so-called internal investigations. In other words, our present police chief is perfectly comfortable with the results of an internal investigation into HPD officer misconduct and corruption to never see the light of day, even to the Hudson Common Council SAFETY Committee. And why would the residents of Hudson need to know anything about HPD officers behaving badly or even violently and unlawfully? Because it never happens? In a recent Monthly Incidents report which I can no longer locate, the number one was next to the line for Internal Investigation. Hmmm... I don't know about you, but I'm still waiting to hear from Chief Franklin at a meeting about some general details and possibly the results of that "internal investigation." Who do you suppose was (or still is) the target of that "internal investigation"? Is (or was) it someone among HPD's top brass? How would anyone outside of HPD ever know which officer or officers are being investigated or were investigated, what the details of the investigation are (or were) and what, if anything, the results were and the punishment was? Why is this the way things are handled in Hudson but not, say, in Albany, where there is an independent, local police review board to keep police misconduct out of the shadows and from behind the blue line? Is it because our present police chief wants to leave things the way they've always been? Why fix something that ain't broke and the Hudson Common Council doesn't want to talk about?
If a city employee outside of HPD, even the mayor or a council member, were being investigated by local or State Police for stealing city funds or punching someone in the face, it would be all over the papers the next day, just as it should be and just like the crimes a recent Hudson Police Commissioner was charged with which forced him to resign both his post as Chatham's Police Chief and our so-called commissioner made it quickly to the press, about as quickly as he resigned his posts. All of that came out because the Chatham Police Department didn't conduct the investigation into their own police chief! But the story of a Hudson police officer using excessive force on a city resident who does or doesn't sustain injuries and sue the officer(s), City Hall and HPD can never see the light of day or newsprint, at least not readily without someone FOILing for it and possibly getting a response? Or how about a member of HPD top brass sending inappropriate and lewd messages to someone on their department's internal email? Or how about an officer regularly uttering racial or sexualized slurs? Is none of this worth revealing to the public even though we all know that these types of issues arise at police departments all over the country with far too much regularity? How would anyone know if there are serious misconduct issues at HPD, perhaps recurring misconduct, and perhaps even among top brass?
Keep HPD top brass talking about their parking problems and successes instead. And don't forget about those plastic parking signs DPW still has to install and reinstall. Parking, it's the only issue on everyone's mind, including the four members of the Common Council's new SAFETY Committee! (And I'm pretty sure one of the members was missing last night... the one representing the 2nd ward who has co-owned a house with his wife in Greenport for the past 10 years that she and their child(ren) live in while he claims to live in the first block of Columbia Street, a claim he has made ever since becoming a council member several years ago.)
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