Commissioner Ricardo Morales woke up Wednesday morning to a stack of referred petitions, complaints, and accusations of negligence from the 11-member city council after Tuesday’s meeting. It all began during discussion of a petition from Ward 5 councilor Patrick Kavey – unopposed in this year’s election – about cleaning up medians and flower boxes in the city.
“I've emailed the commissioner about this. I’m kind of disappointed he left before some of these came up. These are, this continues to be a problem in the city. I don't know why we can't take care of these simple activities that should just take place every year. The excuse of a contractor not showing up or not doing it is not acceptable. Our downtown looks atrocious at best," said at-large city councilor Earl Persip, who is seeking re-election in a field of seven candidates and four open seats. “I hope the commissioner responds to this, he sees this. I will email once again. This just needs to be done, even if it needs to be done in house. Take a half a day's worth of work and some weed whackers and get rid of the weeds. Send somebody down there to pull the weeds.”
At-large city councilor Karen Kalinowsky, who is running for mayor, joined in while discussing her petition for Morales to provide a schedule for weed trimming and garbage collection in the downtown.
“I actually did send it to the commissioner and I did ask him to come to this meeting and talk to us in regard to this," said the councilor. "This is the second time he walked out that I've done a petition, sending it to him by email in advance.”
She shared a harrowing anecdote from a municipal employee.
“One our own city workers that works in the same building as the commissioner came in to work Monday morning with human feces in front of the doorway they had to step around that was there for three days in a row," said Kalinowsky. "That's an issue. That’s a sanitary issue.”
Kalinowsky specifically drew attention to a crosswalk on West Street that connects Berkshire Peak Apartments to Dorothy Amos Park, where pedestrian Shaloon Milord was killed in a traffic collision earlier this year.
“They still didn’t paint the crosswalk," she said. "Why are we ignoring this one area? I know they're looking to do work, but that's another year from now. In the meantime, this is a place where people cross the road. You can't hardly see the crosswalk, and I really think it, me, personally, should have a push button signal light just like they do down on West Housatonic Street.”
Ward 6’s Dina Lampiasi, who faces challenger Craig Gaetani in her bid for another term this fall, joined the pile-on.
“When we're told that something is happening tomorrow, or the next day, it should happen," she said. "And if it doesn't happen, we should be followed up with. And if we are now two months, and it still hasn't happened, that is a problem. I don't know where the breakdown is, but we're talking about sanitation issues. And it's unacceptable.”
Morales only found one defender on the dais, who still qualified his remarks by saying he was also frustrated with the commissioner.
“It seems under new business, we shouldn't have an expectation of someone being here from a department because we haven't voted on it yet and we haven't asked for a presentation from the council. So, I think it's just a slippery slope," said at-large city councilor Pete White, who is also running for re-election. “I think it's unfair to have that expectation on someone who, we don't know what their week looked like. We don't know what other work they were doing. They may not have had time for a presentation that would be up to par or an explanation that we would accept. So, I think if we're going to put things on the agenda, we should go through the process of the agenda and voting on it, and then expecting them to be at the meeting we are asking them to be at. And then we can hold their feet to the fire on the issues that we want to cover.”
But Persip doubled down.
“These are easy things that should be dealt with without petitions, and we find ourselves having to fill petitions to get simple answers about a garbage can, about weeds, about crosswalks being painted," he said. "I had a petition last council meeting, last month, about crosswalks being painted. Still, by our schools, crosswalks are not painted. I emailed the commissioner, the response is, well, which ones? Pick a school. Pick a school and walk three blocks from that school and told me there's a crosswalk painted. It's frustrating, it's getting old, we are concentrating on the wrong things.”
WAMC took the raft of complaints straight to the commissioner Wednesday morning.
“Well, I'm taking the comments made and petitions referred as they come and I need to reply back to the city council for the next council meeting," said Morales. “The only thing I want to address right now is the notion that we have not done anything on the crosswalk over by Dorothy Amos [Park] on West Street. That crosswalk was painted immediately as the spring came in this year. It was retouched in the summer on some worn surfaces. So, this narrative that we did not paint that crosswalk is false.”
The city council meets next on September 26th.
