Quantcast
Advertisement

Alvord on Norwalk sidewalk conditions: It’s not a ‘study’ and you can’t have it

April 3, 2015
–
Nancy Guenther Chapman
Department of Public Works Director Hal Alvord.
Department of Public Works Director Hal Alvord.

NORWALK, Conn. – The city of Norwalk has paid $20,000 to do an analysis of sidewalks in the urban core. Department of Public Works Director Hal Alvord said on Thursday that he would prefer that the public not see the analysis yet, and refused to provide a copy to NancyOnNorwalk. A Freedom of Information request must be filed, he said. Then, of course, the paperwork will be provided, he said.

“There is no big secret here, although some people think there might be,” Alvord said. But, he said, “This is not something I would put out to the public or even to a committee and say, ‘Oh, here you go.’ You can’t make heads or tails of this thing.”

The analysis was authorized by the Common Council in June. Alvord explained Thursday that it is not a study in the way people think of a study – it’s not deciphered for consumption by lay people yet, as it was done as cheaply as possible, just to get information for the engineers in his department.

“People talk about a study,” Alvord said. “They get in their mind they’re going to get a report, nicely bound, with straight out recommendations and all this kind of stuff. That’s not what was done here.”

Council members said last spring that something had to be done to evaluate the sidewalks so they could be repaired, but, “We had no money to even do this,” he said, holding up the analysis, a stapled stack of maybe 15 pieces of paper with what appeared to be columns of figures in small type.

The $20,000 contract was given to the city’s paving consultant, Vanasse Hangen Brustin, Inc. (VHB), because the company had done a footpath analysis 13 or 14 years ago and everyone knew the company could do the work, Alford said.

“We knew they had the skills to do this but we wanted to spend the least amount of money but get valid information,” Alvord said. “So what we did was we set up the spreadsheet. We limited it to within certain parameters in the city. We identified the sidewalk section. We took out the sections that are on state roads or sections that we knew we had done recently and we didn’t have to do that. Then we said you guys go out and analyze them, come up with a ratings system, and that’s what this is. I think they actually did a nice job for the $20,000. They had engineers out walking every section of sidewalk, doing this rating from 1 to 10.”

Senior Civil Engineer Drew Berndlmaier was then asked to study the information and come up with an estimated cost for fixing everything that was a seven to 10, the worst sidewalks, just in Districts A and B, he said.

The estimate was $7 million.

DPW decided to check to see if there are asphalt sidewalks in that zone, he said. There are; Berndlmaier was asked how much it would cost to fix the sidewalks that are a seven or worse and replace the asphalt with concrete, Alvord said.

The estimate was close to $12 million, Alvord said.

“That’s still not all the sidewalks in the city,” Alvord said, but just an area that roughly coincides with Districts A and B, and excludes the state roads.

“We’re going to take this and add in the cost estimating that Drew did and then find a way to present it so it’s not confusing to people,” Alvord said. “You know what kind of confusion this is going to cause? Everybody who thinks they’re an engineer out there is going to go, ‘Oh my God.’ … My preference would be let us put the dollar figures in and then come up with a legend so people understand what was done here. Then I’ll be happy to give it to you.”

An FOI request will be filed.

“I’m not trying to be a jerk,” Alvord said. “…. Again, there’s no big secret here, but if I hand this over to somebody and go, ‘here you go,’ they’re going to go, ‘Are you an idiot? I don’t know what the hell this is telling me.’”

More Stories

Comments

21 responses to “Alvord on Norwalk sidewalk conditions: It’s not a ‘study’ and you can’t have it”

  1. Are you kidding?

    So much for transparency, go ahead blame the mayor like always! These department heads run their own little fiefdoms and have for years, time to let them go.
    He says it is confusing, so what at least we know that (because you told us)and can ask questions to make it not so confusing.

  2. Sara Sikes

    How arrogant! Nancy, I hope that you wrote a request on the spot and gave him. That is an “FOI request.” I am tired of reading about Norwalk stff being rude and uncooperative with members of the public who take the time to attend meetings

  3. sofaman

    OK, yes, nobody likes the sound of an uncooperative public figure, but this sounds like a simple case of information contained in a document that is indecipherable to the casual reader.

    Nothing to get excited about.

  4. Oldtimer

    You and your readers are not smart enough to understand this $20,000 document, paid for by the taxpayers, and obviously a public record, according to Alvord. The next step is to go to his boss and ask for a copy. If that doesn’t get the desired result, then file an FOI request. It is past time to replace Alvord.

    Why wasn’t this study done in-house ? It doesn’t take an engineering degree to walk a sidewalk and report on it’s condition.

  5. Suzanne

    First, he doesn’t put the study out to bid. He just “knows” from 13 or 14 years ago that the selected firm is going to do the best job for the money.

    Then he say it is “no secret” what the report contains. Then he says, it is too confusing to give to the public.

    Then he says an FOI must be filed to obtain a copy thereby providing this confusing document to the public anyway.

    Then he describes the process by which the engineers evaluated the sidewalks, 1 to 10, section by section and STILL it’s too confusing for the average bear.

    Mr. Alvord, who do you work for? Yourself? Your department? Your engineers? How about the constituency, the public who votes to keep this town something worthwhile, something good.

    This denial of responsibility by a department head to the public is not transparent as mentioned above and should be eliminated from the government process due to Norwalk residents who pay for it.

    I don’t know how you can keep a straight face with these “explanations.” This is not how the government we pay for should work and you never, ever seem to realize this.

    These are sidewalks. Report on them. Use that confusing study. Explain it. Done.

  6. Mike Mushak

    Old Timer, The DPW is understaffed and they can barely keep up with existing projects. Maybe 20 years ago they could have done this in house when they had twice as many staff, but it has been whittled down over the years as have all the departments. VHB is a good consultant and they did the 2012 $500K Transportation Management Plan which I refer to often and is well executed.

    Hal should have better handled this request from NON in a more diplomatic manner no doubt, but it sounds like NON caught him at a weak moment, and I agree with sofaman, in that we should not get too excited about it. Hal should just turn the data over and then follow up with a review in plain english that he said would be coming from his staff anyway. His demand for an FOI is absurd. I think Hal was probably exhausted when he said it, and probably regrets it. We know he can be stubborn at times but this is over the top!

    My main recommendation for the whole issue is to STOP the presses right now, and sit down and establish NEW, COMMON SENSE URBAN CORE BOUNDARIES right now that are NOT the 1st and 2nd Taxing District lines, as they make NO SENSE at all to determine where asphalt vs. concrete sidewalks should be.

    This was highlighted with the absurdity of 2 blocks of lower Dry Hill Rd being required to have concrete sidewalks last year, while the rest of the road for over a mile had asphalt installed. Same street, same neighborhood, with two distinctive and absurd and ridiculous distinctions being made about what was “urban core” and “suburban”.

    I actually could not believe anyone in their right mind could even defend that system as the lines run through mid blocks, or down one side of the street, or even right through the middle of properties! Thats right, you can be required by this silly map to have one half of your sidewalk be concrete and the other half asphalt.

    My dear friend Dave McCarthy even kicked me out of a meeting when I said there was something real fishy about this map, and although I should have been less dispruptive about it in hindsight, I made the point loud and clear that this current map stinks.

    The urban core requiring concrete sidewalks should simply encompass ALL commercial areas including Business 1 and 2, Neighborhood Business, and the Design Districts such as in SoNo and Central Business Design districts, and the dense multi-family D residence zone, but NO other residential zones at all! We simply don’t need concrete sidewalks in residential areas except D zones, except when the city decides to do it as part of a complete road project, and only if it makes sense!

    Asphalt lasts almost as long as concrete on sidewalks where it is not driven on like a street, and is cheaper and easier to repair, and allows for some flexibility over tree roots instead of killing trees to install. It also does not heave up in uniform “slabs” from tree roots like concrete does, creating dangerous cliffs where the joints meet, instead of asphalt that can more easily “flow” over the roots. There are instances where asphalt is also heaved up by trees, but even in that case repair is much easier to do and the trees can often be saved instead of sacrificed to install a perfectly level concrete repair.

    My solution above is called “context-sensitive_ design, a trend DOT’s and DPW’s are following around the country. Its time Norwalk stop this “urban core” nonsense and apply the common sense approach I just spelled out, saving millions in taxpayer dollars and reducing costs for homeowners.

    For example, it is absurd that Norwalk does not allow brick sidewalks in the East Avenue Historic District, as when the Norwalk Inn was told they had to have concrete sidewalks only, necessitating the removal of a heathy historic tree that would have been saved if a more flexible brick sidewalk could have been built over its roots. The need for a concrete sidewalk meant chopping out a lot of roots, which in turn would have killed the tree anyway ro risked having it fall on the newly restored 97 East Ave tha the Handrinos family did such an awesome job on. I was angry at forst over the tree removal but it was the city that caused it to be necessary, with their absurd sidewalk standards!

    I asked the DPW if a brick sidewalk was allowed, especially considering it was in an historic district, and I got an emphatic NO. Obviously, we need a new approach, with more “context-sensitive” flexibility with the city’s standards, and certainly a whole new definition of the urban core. PLEASE!!!!

  7. Robert Celli

    Mike Mushak, You are to be commended for continuing to bring this to the attention of the people and the City. It is time for Norwalk to come into the 21st century. I am one of the homeowners to which you refer on lower Dry Hill Road who was left with a severely degraded, damaged, and dangerous sidewalk because of the City’s negligence. I am still waiting for a response to the claim I filed with the city’s self insured agency about a year ago. DPW’s Director Hal Alvord and Mayor Rilling should be ashamed! The condition in which lower Dry Hill Road sidewalks have been left is disgraceful and dangerous. This matter is still unresolved.

    Additionally, your recommendations regarding which districts should have asphalt vs. cement sidewalks is ‘spot-on’ and almost clearly agree with the US Census Tract maps of the City’s Urban Core. Dry Hill Road is a residential neighborhood and I am totally perplexed that part of it has been arbitrarily deemed to be “urban core”. Who determined this random designation and the boundaries that fly in the face of the US government census tracts which clearly notates the City’s urban core? All the Grants the city (urban renewal) applies for are based on the US Census Tracts map of the urban core of which Dry Hill Road is not a part. It appears DPW has created a different urban core map to suit its own agenda. Is it possible that DPW may have violated the rules of the federal government by issuing a map that is clearly contrary to the US Census Tracts upon which they base all grant applications?

  8. Don Chiodo

    I think the approach should be to show some quick wins. Start with Rowayton which has about 1000 feet of actual sidewalk. Shouldn’t take more than six months to complete.

  9. WOW just WOW

    @Are you kidding?
    Actually I do blame the mayor as Alvord is a direct report and if the Mayor was serious about transparency, Mayor Rilling would order Alvord to release the document.

  10. diane c2

    Freedom of Information and transparency are no longer on life support in Norwalk. They are dead. What’s alive and still kicking are arrogance, incompetence, indifference, unprofessionalism, obstructionism, unaccountability, and disregard.

    Newsflash Mr. Alvord: ANY request for information is an FOI request. ANY person can request ANY information from you. You must respond to acknowledge receipt of the request for information within 4 business days of receipt of the request. You must provide an estimate of reasonable time for when you will provide the information. If you subsequently determine the request was not specific enough to fulfill, or that the requested information is not public under FOI statutes, you must state as much in your initial or subsequent response.

  11. John Hamlin

    No one seems to know who the department heads report to — we need a city manager with authority to run all departments and hire and fire (and a lick of sense to use that authority when necessary. This article screams out for charter reform.

    1. Mark Chapman

      @John Hamlin

      Just two points of clarification in this specific incident:

      1. The DPW director is actually one of the handful of department heads whose chain of command is clear — he reports directly to the mayor, and serves at the mayor’s pleasure.

      2. The mayor was not brought into the loop on this particular situation, which arose at the end of the day Thursday. NoN did not contact the mayor to get action. We will file an FOI request and get the information. We can be pretty sure the mayor, who does read the stories here, has found out about the situation by now. I am sure we will have a conversation going forward.

  12. Mr. Ludlow

    I understand why Mike Mushak would defend Hal Alvord (who am I kidding, Mushak’s defense makes no sense). I don’t understand why any department head still has his job after he claims that the city folk who pay his salary are too naive (stupid? confused?) to read a report and make some sense of it.

    So you want to complain that Hal doesn’t want to share a report with the public? We should be more worried that he doesn’t read the reports he does have. How else can anyone explain the sad, sorry state of Norwalk’s infrastructure.

    Let’s see what Norwalk has endured Under Hal’s watchful eye. We had the corroded lightpole that fell (it was never inspected by DPW). We’ve seen the same neighborhoods flood during heavy rains (catch basin maintenance is low among Hal’s priorities). Let’s not forget the high sewerage costs because Norwalk still has catchbasins that direct rain into the sewer system. Oh, we should also thank Hal for the irregular, haphazard snow plow operation.

  13. Paul Persius

    Nothing will ever change in Norwalk until Department Heads are changed. New mayors are a breath of fresh air, but it would be interesting to see a list of department heads and how many years they have been employed by the City. I think the amount of time would be a shock to some. You can not change the way Norwalk does business until you change those in charge of making those decisions. Sure, a new mayor can get a new program (street sweeping) here and there, but fundamental, day to day operations will never change until the lifers are gone and new blood/ideas hired.

  14. OhNoNorwalk

    The Mayor is with the Good Old Boys Network doing the same old stuff. Nothing is going to change in the city. It’s like the mafia running the city. They all will protect the network.

  15. Gordon Tully

    We are not going to solve the nation-wide problem of decaying infrastructure by fiddling with the details or blaming underfunded DPW’s.

    Like all but the densest American communities, we have too much infrastructure. We cannot tax ourselves sufficiently to support its maintenance. The problems are surfacing now because the infrastructure created in the last century has reached the end of its natural life and must be replaced.

    The inability to maintain our infrastructure is a nationwide problem. It is a direct result of the suburban sprawl that we as a people embraced in the middle of the last century. Suburbia turns out to be unsustainably expensive.

    And why did we choose suburbia instead of cities? Because our nation is founded on Libertarian principles, including an aversion to cities, centralized authority and taxes.

    Another reason Norwalk’s infrastructure is in such lousy shape compared with its neighbors is that we live in a relatively affordable city. Our average home price is less than half that of the surrounding communities, largely because our school system is perceived by homebuyers to be undesirable (I have no idea whether our schools are actually undesirable).

    If we could magically create a highly desirable school system, property values would skyrocket and we would have enough tax revenue to repair our infrastructure. But the city would no longer be affordable, and would inevitably become less diverse.

    So next time you hit a pothole driving to the grocery store, remind yourself that it is part of the price of your enviable personal freedom and your ability to live in lower Fairfield County without being a multi-millionaire.

  16. Suzanne

    With respect, Mr. Tully, it is precisely this type of infrastructure that needs improvement, affordable living or not. Whether the DPW is underfunded or not, the price of a study funded by the taxpayer is to reveal it to said taxpayer, not devolve into some excuse for not making such infrastructure process clear.

    This particular study seems to be examining the Urban Core, as yet not clearly identified according to Mr. Mushak, not suburbia. It is the suburbanites that carry downtown not the other way around.

    Maybe this is a problem nationwide but the refusal of a Department Head to reveal what exactly the problems are in this small but telling detail of urban life is not acceptable, whether we have kids in schools here or not.

    I can be grateful to live in Norwalk but that does not mean I have to accept anything less that good governance. This seems to still elude us.

  17. Dinakorm

    What is most transparent is who this blog likes and who they don’t like.

  18. Gordon Tully

    Suzanne, I fully agree that Hal had no business holding back the study. I was addressing the other comments noting the decaying infrastructure in the city.

    I fully agree that better governance is needed, although not in every department. We need to set our priorities right and make sure our limited resources are used to best advantage.

    If openly we hash out what must be done now, what can be done over time, and what is out of reach, one hopes that more of the public will understand the limits of possibility. If we have to do triage, we need to do it out in the open.

    Sadly, there are all too many citizens who are content to stay uninvolved in city affairs except to complain.

  19. Oldtimer

    For now, at least, Alvord won this round.

    Hard to understand, if the real engineering was done in house, developing the spreadsheet and describing the standards to be used, why they needed to hire an outside engineering company, to send people, probably interns, to walk the sidewalks and fill in the blank spaces on that spreadsheet. Even if they had to pay a little overtime or hire a few temps, walking the sidewalks could easily have been done in house, probably for a lot less than $20,000.

  20. Suzanne

    “Sadly, there are all too many citizens who are content to stay uninvolved in city affairs except to complain.”

    “I refuse to join any club that would have me as a member.” Groucho Marx.

    This is how I feel about joining in the effort toward better city affairs. I went to public meetings, I made statements, I signed petitions, I wrote letters and, with each effort, the vituperative responses outweighed the good deeds by far.

    The resiliency one must have to endure any kind of citizen participation eludes me. I will not take abuse nor have to defend myself simply because I want to make my town better.

    That does not mean anyone has to agree with me, just that when they disagree, they do so with a degree of decorum and respect.

    The in fighting in Norwalk is legend. How that stops must come from the top.

Leave a Reply

Newsletter

Secret Link