Alvord, Council agree: Norwalk DPW  ‘dropped ball’ 

NORWALK, Conn. – Damning comments about Norwalk’s Department of Public Works flew  Tuesday as nine Norwalk Common Council members “bit the bullet” and voted to approve a $132,594 expenditure, saying they were doing it to ensure public safety.

The money is going to Northeastern Communications Inc. for the purchase and installation of a high band radio system, replacing a system DPW Director Hal Alvord said is more than 30 years old. Council President Doug Hempstead (R-At Large) voted with four Democrats against the purchase, saying, like others, that it should have gone through the capital budget process but had now become a “crisis.”

“We are forced to go through a single vendor, though vetted through the state, it did not go through a bidding process,” Hempstead said, protesting the process.

“(The) council was put in a very, very difficult situation where we had severe reservations about process. It backed us into a corner, where we now have to vote on something the city truly needs,” Finance Committee Chairman Bruce Kimmel (D-At Large) said. “On the one hand, we were told that our radio system, which is a vital, vital communication system, enabling DPW workers to communicate with each other, was 30 years old and it was on its last legs, and we desperately and quickly need a new system. However, we are also asked to understand or believe for some inexplicable reasons it was not part of the capital budget request.”

Going out to bid could add another six weeks to the process of getting the system, Kimmel said.

Majority Leader Jerry Petrini (R-District D) explained the situation: “At one point we were talking about getting well into the winter plowing season (without new radios),” Petrini said. “Just so you know what is at stake, right now the communication is being handled between dispatch and DPW through hand-held walkie talkies … or it can be done by cell phones. If you remember Hurricane Sandy – and here we are in hurricane season – we lost our grid, the power went down, the cell phones did not work for a number of days.”

Walkie talkies do not work in Cranbury, Silvermine and probably the outstretches of Rowayton, Petrini said.

“If you have no cell phones and police have to communicate with DPW to get them there as remote as it might be, it could happen. I am not prepared to endanger public safety for the simple fact that somebody dropped the ball along the way,” he said, in explaining why he would vote against Hempstead.

“I don’t think anybody has denied that there was an issue here,” Public Works Committee Chairman David McCarthy (R-District E) said. But he found a way to throw a compliment: DPW Operations Manager Lisa Burns “very well admitted that the process had not run perfectly, but there were some honest mistakes with the state.”

Purchasing Agent Gerald Foley “has done a significant amount of research that would seem to indicate that we are getting the deal we would have gotten if we put it out to bid,” McCarthy said.

Councilman David Watts (D-District A) called it “déjà vu all over again” and compared it to the recent  “no-bid contract” for trash compactors.

“We don’t think this is the best deal for the city and I just think that we need to draw the line on this stuff. We need to do it right here, right now, because if we vote for it we’ll see some more of this stuff.  We always present the worst-case scenarios when we’re trying to pass something. Regardless, it is wrong,” Watts said.

“If it was that important it could not have possibly fallen through the cracks as was suggested at the committee level,” Kimmel said. “So we can come to all kinds of conclusions about the organization of DPW and how they put their budget together, but I think that is neither here nor there. The ball was dropped and it was dropped badly. We were backed into a corner because we did need the radio system.”

Voting for the expenditure were Rich Bonenfant (R-At Large), Shannon O’Toole Giandurco (R-District D), Glenn Iannacone (R-At Large), John Kydes (D-District C), Michelle Maggio (R-District C), Kimmel, McCarthy and Petrini. Voting against it were Eloisa Melendez (D-District A), Phaedrel “Faye” Bowman (D-District B), Travis Simms (D-District B), Watts and Hempstead.

How’s that for strange bedfellows?

On Wednesday, Alvord was asked about Kimmel’s characterization of events.

“The bottom line to ‘did we drop the ball?’ is yes,” Alvord said. “Here’s the reason why: In the past 10 years we have been trying to make up for infrastructure and equipment and everything else you can think of that was, let’s just say, under-maintained for a long period of time. We couldn’t do it all at one time, so we set some priorities, you know, roads and bridges, the snowplow fleet and the efficiency equipment for safety, traffic signals and so on. Our radio system is a low band system but it was operating OK and we could get repair parts for the low band system over time to keep the system operational.”

He confirmed Petrini’s account. “We did, in fact, lose our radio system during Sandy because our repeater station was mounted at West Rocks School where there is no backup generator,” Alvord said. “So when the power went out we had no repeater station, we couldn’t use the radio so we used handheld systems. But nevertheless we went about continuing to figure out, could we move our repeater system somewhere else where there was a backup generator and continue to get repair parts for the system to keep it along so that we got to a point where we could put together a system?

“The bottom line is, eventually, nobody was providing the repair parts we needed to keep the low band system going and, in fact, we just couldn’t find anybody, and we never anticipated that we were going to run out places to get repair parts. So we did not foresee this coming and, yes, we missed it. We dropped the ball.”