Board of Aldermen — 4/11/17 Page 13
Alderman Moriarty
Thank you. | was given the presentation at the Budget Review Committee before | even started talking, | was
admonished that dare | make fun of anybody, which | went out of my way not to do. | made a point of giving
the presentation systemically like an engineer. | tried to speak clearly and highlight facts and did everything
within my power not to go out of my way and insult somebody. | ask you that you apply the same rules to my
colleague, Alderman Ken Siegel, who started his comments by insulting me.
Alderman Siegel
| apologize. Let’s just move on. Thank you. Now, let me gather my thoughts again and hopefully | won’t be
interrupted. The $7.5 million has to do with what we can do as a city paving because we have issues with
utilities, we have cut throughs in the streets. There is a whole lot of other logistics that happen. There’s been
several things said that were flat wrong. As the DPW liaison, I’m familiar with all the discussions that have
been going on. I’ve seen the paving presentation multiple times and have discussed this, including the older
presentation that Mayor Lozeau had suggested.
To address Mr. Teeboom’ s concerns, in fact, the local streets do not get choked off. They, in fact, do get
taken care of and that’s part of the plan. This is not a $75 million program. We are voting on a $37.5 million
five-year program in which we are spending $7.5 million to catch up and repair our infrastructure. This is what
we are doing to prevent to kick the can. Our streets are degrading every year. That’s just a fact of life. We
live in New England, things decay. If you have seen the paving presentation, and again I’ve seen it multiple
times, once things go below a certain level, it’s not a linear function. In other words, you go below a certain
paving index and now it’s a multiple of what it cost before to fix because you're using different techniques.
We are at the point now, actually, in a lot of our city streets where we are going to slip to that level. If we do,
there is little or no way we can dig out of it. This is a responsible way to approach the maintenance of a key
component of our city. | can’t emphasize enough that we really are at the point of what | wouldn’t say no
return, but we are at the point where we can spend this money and get a return on our investment that gets our
streets back to the point where they are reasonably maintainable. To not do so now risks a huge amount of
money and an inability to catch up.
Remember as a city, we can’t really do more than about $7.5 million a year in paving because of the logistics.
What happens if we get to the point where that’s well underneath what we have to do? We're now then faced
with a situation where the roads really materially degrade and we actually have little to no hope of doing them
again. It’s areal potential logistical nightmare.
| understand the budget issues. As far as the 4 or 5 million dollars being an appropriate compromise, it’s not.
The consultant these specific figures. There’s some very, very smart people that work on this: the consultant,
there’s a lot of people at DPW that have gone over this. We have a brand new software program. Remember,
one of the things we didn’t want to do when Mayor Lozeau proposed this was two elements. It wasn’t just that it
dealt only with the arterials. That was a big concern because the neighborhoods weren't going to be taken
care of. But the other thing that was very, very important is we had purchased a software program and what
we wanted to do was implement that program and populate it with data to understand what is the real condition
of our streets. Rather than rush in and adopt a bond and not know correctly how to deploy our resources so
we are most effectively deploying the capital to hit the streets at the right time to maximize our return on
investment, we decided not to do that.
Now we are at a position where we fully inventoried our streets. We have the data. Now we have to do
something. | got to tell you, having been exposed now for several years of working this stuff at BPW, we really
don’t have a choice. | don’t really like spending this money. | really don’t. But do you know what | really, really
don’t want to do? Spend $100 million more in a city that is pot-marked and cratered. | strongly urge you to
consider that in voting for this. This is very important.
