Letter: Norwalk Mayor Creates Jobs With Potholes

NORWALK, Conn. – This is a post on Norwalk Center, a Google group created to address issues in central Norwalk.

In a recent article on The Daily Norwalk, Democratic mayoral candidate Andy Garfunkel accused Mayor Richard Moccia of failing to retain or create jobs.

I must correct Mr. Garfunkel on that. In the past two years, Mayor Moccia has stimulated the local auto industry. Specifically, Town Fair Tire where I go for my ANNUAL front end alignments, AutoZone and my local body shop to repair the driver's door hinges on my car and the Chevy dealership (oh, that's in Wilton) for a new mount for my car stereo. This entire stimulus is due to the mayor's allergy to asphalt paving products.

Moccia has allowed our streets to deteriorate to a point that the Common Council should approach Ford, Chrysler and GM for naming rights and for use of our roads as their SUV test track/proving grounds. Moccia has allowed the utilities to carpet bomb our streets without any accountability.

As a resident of the Lower West Rocks area, I have waited more than patiently for France Street, Eclipse Street and Union Avenue to be repaired. France Street has finally been done, but Union Avenue looks like a street from downtown Baghdad. It barely eclipses Eclipse Street. Now we have Yankee Gas digging up Ward Street. It might be necessary work, but a little communications with local residents would be nice. The city of Norwalk's website is tragically underused but would be a great tool to announce upcoming projects such as this. Will Ward Street be repaved or will it just be patched to resemble the current state of Union Avenue?

The Camp Street sidewalk project is another issue. When will it be completed? This project was started the first week of August and was supposed to be finished by the Sept. 1 opening of school. More than two months later, it is still not finished. The contractor appears to have walked off the job as there has been no progress in the past month and abandoned piles of rubble and debris exist behind the old Theodore's Furniture building. The west side of Camp Street is still impassible with sections missing in front of 7 and 21 Camp St. Please Mr. Mayor, do NOT even mention holdups due to the blue stone curbing fiasco. If your people did their jobs correctly and communicated with the residents of that historic district, the street would have retained its character, been completed in a reasonable amount of time (maybe) and saved the taxpayers money by reusing viable product and just resetting them.

I feel a complete audit of all road work in the city is warranted. Final road patches are to be done by the city's Department of Public Works or its contractor. When a road is opened, the city bills the responsible party for that work. Their contractor puts down a temp patch and once it has settled, the city is supposed to finish the job. Either the city is sitting on the money collected and leaving the temporary patched or there is no oversight of the city's contractor and they are doing substandard work.

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