There's Politics Even in Snow Removal, It Seems
Mayor Adrian Fenty's cleared street in Crestwood2010 2009 storm -- and people will applaud.
Of course, not everyone is equally happy or angry after a big storm. Some neighborhood streets gets cleared before others, and for those who live on uncleared streets, there's often a nefarious reason that they've been ignored. After December's storm, District resident Denise Wiktor wrote to the bi-weekly online newsletter themail to air her grievances with what she saw as a plowing and salting operation that prioritized based on income instead of need. "The disparity between how the rich and rest of us are treated by DPW is obvious," she wrote, citing a comparison between streets in Mt. Pleasant and Georgetown.
Yesterday, Michael Cover, a resident of the Crestwood neighborhood -- home to Mayor Fenty -- wrote an email to his local listserv abour road-clearing. Titled "Why am I not surprised?", he wrote, "that the street in front of the mayor's house is clear down to the pavement while mine (and most of Crestwood) has not seen a plow or salt since yesterday morning." An attached picture showed a nicely cleared residential road, an anomaly that appeared soon after the storm had ended.
Given that the majority of the District's residents don't personally like Fenty and that he's regularly accused of being aloof and arrogant, the image would seem to provide evidence of the city's chief executive using public resources for his own convenience. And in the scheme of urban snow-removal poiticking, that's bad. But a fellow neighbor saw differently, responding, "Since the Mayor is our elected leader, elected to take care of city problems, it seems reasonable to enable him to move about freely."
I'd have to agree. I spent plenty of time over the weekend watching local news, and it seemed like Fenty was at every snow-related press conference he could find. It's amusing that we've grown to expect that our mayor be out and about as storms hit, as if he's actually manning a front-end loader or sprinkling salt on your sidewalk. There's apparently a measure of confidence in seeing the District's mayor "on top" of things, even if that only means that he's out there telling TV cameras that every snowplow the city has in working order are on city streets.
How have you seen snow removal operations proceeding? On a bike ride around the city yesterday, I was surprised to see good progress on main arteries, even though many neighborhood streets remained untouched. That being said, a convoy of plows treated Kenyon Street in Mt. Pleasant on Saturday morning, and I generally saw plows out and about over the course of the weekend. How's your neighborhood faring? Does Fenty get a thumbs up or a thumbs down, or is it too early to tell?