The City Owes Me $200

We lost a tree in the ice storm -- fell over the driveway. Some friends of ours came over and cut it up and off the driveway so we could get our cars off the street. Then my son and I finished cutting everything else up, made the stacks like we were supposed to do, and waited for the city crews to pick them up. The stacks went the entire length of our yard, but I figured they wouldn't be there long.

That was months ago. I've been checking the online Metro Gov site, tracking the pickup progress in our part of town. We're in E4, and they're working backward in the E section, so there are five segments in front of ours. At the rate they were moving (five segments in two months), I figured they would get to us sometime around June 15.

So, when two guys from Minnesota knocked on the door and asked my wife if we would pay $200 to make all of it go away, she said yes. Not only did they haul away all the debris, they also trimmed the two remaining trees, getting down some damaged branches and shaping the trees. They also hauled away the large trunk pieces left from the tree (I chopped most of it up for firewood).

I understand that this was an unprecedented natural disaster for the city. I understand that we can't staff our public works for the exceptions, which means that sometimes it's going to take a while to get things done. I think our city government does many things well, and I'm usually a staunch supporter of it.

But you know, in this economy, I bet you could have taken the Cordish money and spent it on debris removal, and generated much more immediate stimulus for the area. In fact, at $10 an hour paid to contractors, $900,000 would give you 90,000 hours of work, which is about 280 extra persons for two months. I suspect that 280 more workers over the past two months would mean we'd be done by now.

"No one could have known it would take this long." Sorry -- that line didn't work with Bush and Katrina, and it won't work now. You're not held responsible for the storm and its aftermath ... but you ARE held responsible for how you manage it. And after the first two weeks, the city's public works management should have had two facts in hand: how much debris there was, and how fast it was being removed. At that point, it's a simple calculation to see when you will be done, and to either tell the city "It's going to be mid-summer; deal with it" or "The rate is unacceptable, so we're going to spend the money to speed it up, even though that will mean hitting the rainy day fund" (or however you decide to pay for it).

The only reason Metro Gov is hiring the extra crews now is because of the political fallout. If people weren't raising Cain, and the paper weren't running a daily count on the editorial page, the city would still be moving at the same speed. And for some of us, that rate was just too slow.

So, as far as I'm concerned, this was a time when government did not do one of the things we pay it to do: deal with a city-wide aftermath of a natural event. I'm out $200, the grass in my yard is dead, and the city crews are nowhere to be seen. I think I'll send the bill to Cordish.

Comments

[David Bannister]

Wow. Get'm Bruce! Get'm!

It's pretty awful, I take the bus all over town nowadays and I still see yards and sidewalks littered with it. But overall Audobon has been cleaned up.

But hey, at least its gone right?

[Bruce]

Yes, it's gone -- but it should have been done sooner, or at least managed better.