Community Post

Joel Connelly: ‘It’s time to get angry…..’

‘…about city’s respnse to snow’

Joel, a Madrona neighbor (hmmmnm wonder if he reads CD News) writes about politics and has one of the most active group of commenters around: they love him, they hate him, they correct his use of English and the trolls abound.

But this column got 168 comments in a little over 7 hours.  Lot’s of people are pretty darn hot about this.  I agree with Joel about Union to 34th or Cherry to 34th….although I seem to remember many days with nada in 1996.

Joel does say that, ‘Instead of the mellow attitude urged by my newspaper on Tuesday morning, I would suggest that the public adopt a demeanor that famed economist John Kenneth Galbraith suggested in dealing with unresponsive bureaucracies: “Cultivate a modest aspect of menace.”‘

And, I would say to Joel that a lot of us have been VERY angry at the city for some time for many inciddents of utter incompetence.  Seems a lot of people want to be in office to grandstand in style on some ‘big’ ideas.  That is not the job of running a municipality,  Running a city is about roads and sewers and cops and REALLY boring stuff like that.  The fact that we are told to call Ron Sims to complain about the buses not running when the buses CAN’T RUN UNTIL THE CITY CLEARS THE D*** STREETS deserves a personal visit to the Mayor’s office by a group of concerned citizens or maybe ummm a lawsuit by small businesses over lost revenues to make them get it right.

See the article, and the any comments at:

http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/connelly/393387_joel24.html

 

 

 

0 thoughts on “Joel Connelly: ‘It’s time to get angry…..’

  1. i’ve been trying to foment this type of “anger” wrt the city’s response and I think Joel hits the nail on the head–we’re too passive about the stuff that really matters in our city. This is a core issue and the city has bungled it.

    What’s worse, this is truly an economic or “social justice” issue. If you getting to work means getting paid and you live in the CD, best of luck. You probably aren’t getting paid, or not as much.

  2. It’s pretty interesting to read the other neighborhood blogs:

    http://www.seattle.gov/html/citizen/media.htm#blogs

    West Seattle folks seem pretty upset.

  3. Ummmm if you had logged in we could click through and get the full benefit of the ‘i told you so’ :-)

  4. i have zero anger and am grateful to live in one of the few cities in the u.s. where the people in charge care about the environment.

  5. I’m actually ok if they do not use salt. I think there is a deeper level of stupidity, arrogance and incompetence here. Most municipalities use private contractors, gardeners, anyone who has a plow attachment. Not only does Seattle not include them, but it is ILLEGAL for any of them to plow Seattle streets.

    This is where things have become stupid.

    It’s also the height of misdirection to tell people to complain to Ron Sims because there is no bus available — and everyone can’t walk particularly on the icy sidewalks – when the problem is that the buses cannot travel of the streets are not at least plowed. If Union had been plowed, the 11 could have gone on it’s alternate route, for example.

    Everyone does not have the luxury of staying home from work.

  6. Honestly I haven’t had a problem with the city’s response to the snow. They were doing the best they could considering the unusual conditions. This happens so very infrequently there’s no reason that you can’t expect the city to be able to clear it right away or perhaps even at all…

    Some people don’t seem to understand plows at all – plows do not clear the street to pavement, you’d just ruin the plow and the street if you did that… the plow just clears away the excess snow, then you sand or salt and NO, most places don’t allow just anyone to go out and plow the streets… When I lived in Rochester (NY) our street was covered with a coating of compact snow all winter long, that was how it was done. Side streets were left with a few inches of compact snow/ice and the main streets were salted. I can understand the reluctance to salt out here. Snow usually melts away in a few days if not a few hours, its not worth the side effects or the cost and storage. Salt is *very* destructive. It kills the vegetation, destroys cars (at the bottom of which ocean have you had this thing parked – asked one body shop about our old truck), it gets into the water, ruins your shoes and helps destroy the pavement.

    As far as the sidewalks go… It’s YOUR RESPONSIBILITY to shovel or arrange to have the sidewalk shoveled in front of your house… or your landlord’s if you rent. If you want to be mad about that blame your neighbors. My sidewalk is clean, but then again I grew up in a place where we learned to use a shovel…