Friday, March 27, 2015

Water torture created by drips, worsened by fibs

During the Rosamilia administration, it has not been unusual to hear complaints about City Hall and various departments routinely failing to communicate well, or at all, with City residents.

The calls from beleaguered Lansingburgh residents about their much-publicized frozen water pipes that went unanswered by the mayor and his staff, the failure to respond to e-mails and calls about poor snow removal, the lack of follow-through on requests for replacement trash receptacles damaged by city pickup crews, the misinformation given out to callers by the Department of Public Works about garbage pickup on snowy days, the City failing to notice that County-provided tax information was wrong and passing it along to City taxpayers to cause confusion ... The list goes on and on.

The latest problem is clearly one more case of bureaucratic incompetence and disdain for the public.

It's a flap over a letter sent out to many City residents -- not just a handful in the Miami Beach neighborhood as the Times Union is erroneously reporting -- replete with scare tactics and an unnecessarily nasty tone.

The smarmy letter -- my first reaction to reading it was "Who the hell do they think they are?" -- informed recipients that new digital water meters needed to be installed in their homes, gave them 30 days to schedule the work or else -- and this was emphasized -- their water would be shut off.

Not a polite notice and a request to make an appointment. No, that would have been too intelligent. Public Works made the conscious and foolish decision to take a routine bit of work and turn it into an  imperious demand-and-threat situation, thereby alienating the people the department is supposed to serve, not dictate to.

I asked the city workers who installed my new meter if they had heard any negative feedback from other homes they had visited. "Just about every single one," was the reply. "People say they are really pissed at the tone and the threat."

Mayor Lou Rosamilia's spokesman Michael Morris told reporters the wrong notice was mailed out by the City. He said residents should have received a 30-day notice followed by, if that was not met, a 10-day shutoff notice. Woulda, shoulda, coulda.

He also was quoted as saying the miscue was in only one area of the City and that homeowners had been contacted to advise them of the mistake.

Note to Mr. Morris and the whole world: Neither of those statements is true.

I do not live in the Miami Beach neighborhood yet I received one of the offensive notices, and I am not alone in that as busy social media makes clear. No one ever contacted me to own up to a mistake. As a matter of fact, even when I called Public Works to schedule an appointment, the person who  answered the phone -- with barely-disguised annoyance at being bothered by a mere member of the public that pays her salary -- never mentioned anything about a mistake.

When I moved to Troy 20 years ago, I was looking forward to being part of a city on  the upswing. Today, I can say with conviction that, yes, downtown Troy is on the upswing but the rest of the City is, for the most part, just left swinging.

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