My tax dollars at make-work
I’m generally a pro-public-servant guy. After all, I spent seven years on federal and state government payrolls myself. But I gotta call ‘em like I see ‘em.
I just saw three guys from the Boston Department of Public Works do the work of one.
Problem: there’s a pothole next to a manhole cover in front of my house.
Solution: Guy #1 drives a big flatbed truck with pothole-filling material. He stops the truck with its back to the pothole. Guy #2 gets out of the truck and walks around to the back. He gets a shovel and loads some fill material from the back of the truck into the hole. Meanwhile, Guy #3 has followed behind driving an empty pickup. He gets out of the pickup and watches Guy #2 fill the hole. Then Guy #3 picks up his tamp-down tool and flattens the pile that Guy #2 made. Guys #2 and #3 then get back in their trucks and they drive away.
From what I could tell, this was the only kind of job that this crew was equipped for. I suppose it’s possible that later in the day they would encounter some task that would require all three of them to work simultaneously, but I doubt it.
It’s sad, really. I’m sending this to my City Councilor to see if there’s a good reason for this.
Comment from david
Time May 7, 2009 at 3:35 pm
Props to Councilor Ciommo’s office. They got my input through their web site and one of their staff members (a) called me to acknowledge the issue; (b) called DPW to get their take on it; and (c) called me back with DPW’s explanation.
DPW says they always need two trucks for this job because if they don’t have a second truck blocking traffic the guys filling the pothole are at risk of being run over. You know what? I’ll give them that. It’s not like they can carry the fill material on the front of the truck, and I can certainly see why the DPW crew wouldn’t want to stand in the middle of the street without a buffer. I suppose in theory they could have a flagger jump out of the truck, but there’s no question that a pickup truck provides more protection than a guy in a vest.
As for the number of workers, DPW says sometimes they send out two guys and sometimes three, depending on the volume of work that day and the size of the holes to be filled.
What I appreciated most was the admission on both DPW’s and the Council staffer’s part was that this procedure, when carried out on a small side street like mine, could look “silly.” It’s a good reminder to me that you rarely get the whole story by witnessing an isolated incident.