City Councilors Ed Flynn and Michael Flaherty will do their part to prod the city - and state and federal - public-works crews to ensure we won't see any repeats of the incident last week when a light pole held only by rusted bolts gave way and fell on a woman walking across the Moakley Bridge. Read more.
The Boston Public Works Department plans to receive a 3,000-ton shipment of salt tomorrow morning at its Frontage Road storage area as it begins to build up its salt stockpiles in preparation for the W word.
Earlier:
Plow blades headed our way.
City officials said today they are pouring extra manpower into cleaning up city streets and sidewalks as the snow melts, but say making Boston shine again is going to take help from residents.
City Councilor Sal LaMattina (North End, East Boston, Charlestown) said he hopes residents put as much effort into cleaning the curbs and sidewalks in front of their homes as they put into helping neighbors shovel out their cars.
"We're all in this together," he said at a hearing called by Councilor Matt O'Malley (West Roxbury, Jamaica Plain) to look at city plans for post-snowpocalypse cleanup.
The Globe reports the guy cleaned up in more ways than one - at least until officers who had him under surveillance at the Dana Avenue DPW yard arrested him on River Street.
Start charging for trash bags or at the least, start enforcing the city ordinance against putting recyclables in the trash, our own eeka suggests.
UPDATE: Turns out it wasn't the city (or the state) that put the signs up; in any case, they've been removed.
An aggrieved Mission Hill resident reports from Tremont Street near Huntington Avenue, which the DPW has decided people really need to know is also Rte. 9:
We can't get crosswalk signs, but please--put highway signs in the middle of the sidewalk. Perhaps we should just eliminate those pesky sidewalks all together.
Earlier this week, you may recall, Boston Police asked newspaper distributors to remove their boxes from areas where hopped-up Celtics revelers/mourners might be tempted to use them to put holes in plate-glass windows.
Wednesday is Prince Spaghetti Day trash day up on Grew Hill. Except, apparently, today, where the streets are still lined with trash barrels and bags. The Mayor's Hotline says they're running behind and whatever the crews don't get to tonight, they'll swing by tomorrow to pick up.
So many West Roxbury residents called the Mayor's Hotline to complain about Monday's canceled trash pickup that the city sent trucks out today to pick up the trash, ParkwayBoston reports:
My phone started ringing at 8 o'clock this morning from family and neighbors saying that the garbage trucks were in the neighborhood. ...
Seems that the cancellation of today's Boston trash pickup doesn't mean a one-day delay, as with holidays, but as much as a week's delay for Bostonians not fortunate enough to live in areas with two or three pickups a week. Such as Ed Coppinger of West Roxbury, who wonders how he's going to get his snow-laden barrels back in the yard and whether he'll need to buy a new one. Also, when he called the Mayor's Hotline, the man who answered agreed he has every right to be annoyed.
The Herald reports:
A Boston public works employee suspended twice for sleeping on the job faces firing after allegedly torching a Mattapan home in a boozy spat over a necklace, authorities said.
Interesting: The Boston Department of Public Works is under investigation because of workers allegedly falsifying time cards, but the DPW director gets suspended because he did something to encourage an employee to do her work.
Oh, sure, that something was letting her telecommute from Venezuela for awhile, but there's no indication she did anything wrong or didn't do her work (even the city mouthpiece acknowledges she faces no punishment because she asked for permission).
As somebody who telecommutes, I'm thinking Hizzoner doesn't really get this whole computer-networky thing. If this woman's job consisted entirely of working on servers - and she was a systems analyst, not somebody whom the public would ever contact - it doesn't really matter where she is physically as long as the phone lines stay up. A server doesn't care if you're accessing it from down the hall or the other side of the hemisphere. VPNs truly are wondrous things, as are reliable phone links.
Good to see the mayor is cracking down on lazy Public Works employees, but why do stories like this always seems to mention how this isn't the first time an issue like this has come up?
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