When these winter storms of our discontent started, I visited Mayor Pawlowski's Facebook page. He assured everybody that he was on top of it, and that the streets were in good shape. There are small streets on the east side that have yet to see a plow. There are heavily used streets, such as Liberty, which has yet to be cleared curb to curb, end to end. Reports from the field yesterday indicated that the city was clearing 14th Street. In a lifetime of traveling Allentown, I don't think that I have ever used 14th Street; Who's in charge? Another cost of the water lease was losing the manpower, equipment and experience which helped clear the snow in the winter time. While the Administration and media are fixated on the arena's progress, essential public service is ignored.
The snow clearing priorities made no sense to me. They cleared West and Fulton Streets in the very first round, which are by no main arteries . Yesterday they were clearing Union St which was impassable to navigate for school buses and cars unless one direction stopped to give right or way. I would love to hear an explanation for how the city set the priorities for clearing streets.
ReplyDeleteMM the city is bad many roads are one lane. Not good planning. Wonder if and when the parade route will be cleared in the west end,if not we have a place to keep our beer cold.as I recall the city was to have gps in the plow trucks to better coordinate snow removal.
ReplyDeleteobserver@7:30, all that remodeling at city hall, and all those computer and technology upgrades to improve efficiency, were nonsense.
ReplyDeleteThe monster must be fed.
ReplyDeleteToday was street cleaning on my block. Quite a few people mistakenly believed that huge mounds of equipment destroying ice would make impossible the task of street sweeping.
The APA issued tickets and was followed by a street sweeper that went down the center of the street - at least two feet from both the ticketed cars and the many unoccupied spots.
The driver of the sweeper obviously knows that the piles of rock hard ice aren't good for his machine and avoided ALL of them completely (thank you for not ruining our city vehicle.) I suspect the materials he was removing are a very small fraction of what a "normal" cleaning produces.
But the truth remains that tickets are the life blood of the APA and must be issued.
Today I seen the Monster in action leaving more dirt than was there in the first place? This was in the 600blk of liberty st and boy they made a hall from seeing all the orange tickets on cars?
ReplyDeleteYet there are vehicles making impassable streets for emergency vehicles that is risk of life? These infractions go unaddressed in certian areas as well as the circus acts of the third world nation unto itself plays out in downtown?
redd
patent pending
At City Council, Councilman Schweyer mentioned, "$250,000 to $500,000" in snow removal costs. This is less than the amount mentioned at a previous meeting, $750,000.
ReplyDeleteOver budget? Most of it, or something like that. That's what they are saying..."we have some money for some of the expense but we have to take some from the General Fund."
Was the "snow failure" due to shortage of money or poor planning/strategy? If it snows again this year, we will simply continue to pay someone (we have no workforce dedicated to this) to plow the snow.
Where will this money come from?
Remember...We do not receive a $500,000 royalty from LCA this year.
The PFM/Pawlowski plan stated that if they did not get the $4.5 million royalty, the plan would not work. The money would not balance in the budget. This was in their own Power Point presentation.
http://www.allentownpa.gov/Portals/0/files/Mayors-office/PFM%20Sept%2027%20-%20v1.pdf
Read pages 19, 21, 23 (shows royalty fee on top line), 24 (Pawlowski picked Option 2) and 25 where it states, "If bid amount or other bid parameters do not conform, the process stops"
They didn't stop the bid. They accepted the bid without the $4.5 million royalty that was needed to make this scheme.
No one seemed to care about this. The Citizens of Allentown allowed this to happen.