City agencies are unresponsive

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To err is human, an ancient Roman philosopher said, and today’s New York City agencies should not find themselves in particularly hot water for making the occasional small mistake, such as the one the Metropolitan Transportation Authority made this summer when it dispatched workers to install a fence in the wrong part of Spuyten Duyvil Shorefront Park. 

The MTA has since removed the misplaced fence, and the issue here is not whether the transportation authority made an error (for the record, it has conceded that it did) — but the efforts it took to get the error fixed. 

As soon as local residents saw the fence going up, they began calling 311, local politicians, and the Parks and Recreation Department. But city services that took the calls seemed in no rush to look into the error, until a local politician dispatched an aide to handle the matter. 

Despite all the residents’ calls to 311, a MTA spokeswoman said the authority only learned about its error when it received a call from the office of Bronx Councilman Andrew Cohen. 

Kudos to Mr. Cohen’s office for getting the matter resolved. But people in Spuyten Duyvil and elsewhere should not have to call politicians to get city services to do their job and fix construction errors or road potholes. And having politicians duplicate the duties of city services is not an efficient way of running things. 

Yet getting the city’s services to respond to complaints can take a long time. 

A woman who identified herself as Karen Fragin, a resident of the neighborhood around W. 249th Street and Arlington Avenue, called The Press last week to complain about what she described as a pool of “standing water” that accumulates on the corner of the two roadways, never dries, and turns into a slippery patch of ice during the winter.

“It feels like we live in a slum,” she said. 

The slummy pool turned out to be a puddle. The water collects in a pothole on the curb of the road, and the body of water measured less than a couple of feet at its greatest dimension when a Press journalist visited the area last week, following a recent series of rainstorms. 

Whether or not a puddle qualifies as a sign of a “slum” may be open for debate, but puddles and potholes, nonetheless, can be a nuisance. And according to Ms. Fragin, local residents have been calling and writing letters to city officials for at least two years, to no avail. 

In yet another case recently, the stump of a tree that fell into the stained glass window of Christ Church of Riverdale in early April remained protruding from the sidewalk months later. 

“It is huge, uprooted and very dangerous,” Rev. Andrew Butler, the church’s rector, said. 

The Parks Department, whose workers removed most of the tree in April, told The Press in July it appreciated residents’ concerns about the stump and would be removing it. The stump is now gone. But between April and mid-July, Rev. Butler’s repeated calls to city officials were getting redirected in a classic case of “passing the buck,” he said. The result of this lengthy crusade? The Transportation Department finally denied his request, Rev. Butler said. 

Unlike politicians, city agency employees run no risk of being voted out office for neglecting their job duties. But city employees are public employees who receive their wages from taxpayers, and the public should have an easier time getting its employees to do their jobs. 

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