One Year Later On Front Street: Progress, Replacement, Destruction, Waste, Deflection and Revitalization A La Luizzi and Rob Perry

 

These are last year's decorative stone pavers, unwanted, unusable and ready to be shipped to a landfill somewhere far away.  I took this picture earlier tonight, which means the pile and cone will remain in the street at least until tomorrow morning, perhaps through the weekend if we are lucky.  Thanks for caring, Luizzi, you guys are great!!!!  Come back every year and help make Hudson beautiful, won't you, please? 

Yesterday, also not far from the entrance to Promenade but prior to the arrival of the pile of stone pavers, I noticed an orange cone at the curb where a black fiberglass lamppost once stood.  Something had recently ripped the pole apart at the base, and if I had to guess the culprit, I would say it was one of Luizzi's vehicles or pieces of machinery backing up.  That lamppost and the several others installed on Front last year, along with the widened concrete sidewalk and unnecessary and dumb decorative stone pavers, were all part of the 10-million-dollar DRI project.  

Don't you love how someone didn't bother
to clean up their mess!  Why would they?
There ain't no one payin' attention!

Does the city know who destroyed that lamppost so that we can send them the bill to have it replaced?  Wouldn't it be f'n hilarious if Luizzi did destroy that streetlamp that was installed last year!  Why should we not be surprised if they did?

What is still true this year is that no one from Hudson City Hall is paying attention to what Luizzi is creating for us.  Had someone from City Hall (ahem, Rob Perry) had been paying attention to what Luizzi was doing last year (like every friggin' day for at least ten minutes!), we wouldn't be in this time-wasting, unwelcome, absurd and generally wasteful situation right now.  This was all too predictable.  Don't believe me?  Just read what Rob Perry had to say about it!

Here is part of what Spencer Walsh wrote in the recent Register-Star article about Luizzi's return to Hudson.  It's a quote from our $125,000 DPW Superintendent, explaining what he didn't see Luizzi creating for us last year, apparently only discovering it months after the work was done.  It's all so laughable, but so very par for the course around here.  "The stones are supposed to be at the same level, and the mortar that goes in between them is also supposed to be at the same level.  What happened is that in some places granite setts were low and in some places they were high, creating a trip hazard.  In some places the mortar was low which creates a place for water to rest, creating ice.  After the subpar installation became apparent, the city withheld $200,000 it was supposed to pay Luizzi for their work last year."  

He might as well have whined, "They did it, not me. I didn't have anything to do with this mess."

The long and short of it is that Rob Perry allowed Luizzi to leave us with shit because he was not paying attention to what they were doing to our sidewalks.  There is no other reasonable conclusion one can make explaining how we were forced to get Luizzi back here to fix their messes and block our sidewalks again.  It was Rob Perry's fault, plain and simple.  He admitted as much to Spencer Walsh:  "Luizzi did it wrong.  They should have done it this way!  We only found out about it later because no one was paying attention, including me!"  Thanks for letting us know one year later, Rob!  You are so very helpful and insightful!  You are so on it, dude!  Are you bothering to pay attention to what Luizzi is doing this year so that we don't have to ask them to return next year to replace more crap work of theirs and you won't have to explain what went wrong again?  Or can you not be bothered about any of this?  Are you completely checked out and unaccountable?

I mean, honestly, is it any skin off of Rob Perry's back that Luizzi had to return to Hudson to fix their shit work he supposedly didn't know about at the time?  Of course it isn't!  And therein lies the real problem that is much, much more concerning and unwelcome than Luizzi's amateur stone work.   Amateurs make mistakes all the time.  It's the professionals in the room that have to keep the amateurs' mistakes to a minimum.  If they want to, of course.

It never stops coming back up here on HUDseen:  NO ONE AT CITY HALL IS PAYING FUCKING ATTENTION!  NO ONE, NO MATTER WHO THE MAYOR IS!  This can't go on for much longer, people!

(It turns out that what I call stone pavers are also known as setts.)