Dear Gov. Patrick (via Fax), Rep. Honan, Rep. Brownsberger, Mayor Menino, and members of the Boston City Council,

I am writing to you all in incensed opposition to the abhorrent plan currently under discussion to close the MBTA’s budget gap by decimating Massachusetts public transportation.

The T’s budget gap is structural, resulting from the Big Dig debt thrust upon it several years ago, coupled with sales tax revenue that was supposed to increase but flattened instead. Drastic cuts in service won’t actually solve the structural issue, they’ll merely postpone it. They are not the answer.

The idea some people seem to have that public transportation should pay for itself is simply absurd. Public transportation is an essential public service, like roads, bridges, police, fire departments, and schools. Do the Commonwealth’s roads and bridges pay for their own maintenance?

I ride the 501 express bus from my neighborhood in Brighton to and from my job downtown nearly every day. No matter what time of day I commute, the bus is full or nearly full. Eliminating this particular route will cause many T riders to start driving to work instead of taking the bus, increasing pollution, traffic, and road maintenance costs. It will also make Brighton a far less attractive and stable neighborhood and damage property values, since easy access is to downtown is a huge plus for professionals looking for a place to live.

Every one of the more than 100 other routes whose elimination is under discussion serves many people whose lives and communities would be similarly impacted by the elimination of their route. This proposal isn’t an answer; it’s a disaster.

The right way to solve the T’s budget woes is actually quite obvious:

• The Legislature should compare how much the T was projected to receive from the 20% cut of sales tax revenue vs. how much it actually received, and pay off that much of the T’s debt, including any debt servicing interest paid on it over the years, from the state’s general fund or rainy day fund.

• The T should raise its fares to make them comparable to fares charged in other cities and should raise them regularly moving forward to keep up with inflation. Some of the fares charged by the T are absurdly low. For example, I pay $89 per month to ride the 501 bus every day, whereas if I drove to work I’d pay a minimum of $265 for parking, not to mention possibly needing to buy and insure a car, as well as paying for gas and increased maintenance. I suspect the T could easily charge 50% more than it’s charging now for the 501 and other express buses and keep most of their riders. I know I’d pay it.

• Other sources of revenue, such as income or sales taxes or even state highway and bridge tolls, should be used to offset any remaining budget gap on a year-by-year basis. To make this politically feasible, the Legislature needs to change the conversation by first educating itself, and then educating the public through a massive public opinion campaign, about the fact that a good public transportation system actually saves the Commonwealth and its citizens money, creates jobs, reduces traffic, protects the environment, and reduces our country’s dependence on foreign oil.

I love living in Boston. However, the parochial mentality which so often seems to dominate how things are done around here frequently prompts me to wonder if I live in a minor town with pretensions of being a major city. Destroying our public transportation system would reinforce that image in many people’s minds. Please don’t let this happen.

Sincerely,

Jonathan Kamens

CC: fareproposal@mbta.com

Speaking as a religious Jew, I can assure you that I do not find it “inclusive” or “welcoming” for you to call the tree you’re lighting today a “holiday tree”.

If it were my choice, there would be no religious symbols of any sort on public property. But since that’s never going to happen, at the very least the symbols that are erected to recognize various people’s religious observances should actually recognize those observances, not water them down and engage in ludicrous newspeak to imply they’re something they’re not.

The only December holiday that involves a tree is Christmas. Please call it what it is and stop pandering to a class of people that don’t actually exist. Nobody who’s offended by Christmas trees on public property is mollified by calling them something different.

Sincerely,

Jonathan Kamens

I write in opposition to H.408, “legislation to establish civil or criminal penalties for motorists failing to yield to bicyclists,” which you sponsored.

Bicyclists are legally prohibited from riding in crosswalks. To use the crosswalk, a bicyclist is legally required to dismount from his bicycle and walk it, thus making him a pedestrian and therefore protected by the existing law. If he does not dismount, he is legally required to operate his bicycle as a vehicle, which means (among other things) staying out of the crosswalk.

Bicyclists riding in crosswalks are dangerous both to pedestrians and other vehicles on the road. It is both unnecessary and unreasonable to enshrine into law protections which would encourage bicyclists to violate other laws and operate their vehicles dangerously.

Drivers can already be cited for driving unsafely; there is no need for a new law protecting bicyclists in this particular context. This is especially true since the law would create a presumption that the driver of a car that strikes a bicycle in a crosswalk was at fault, when in fact it is just as likely, if not more so, that the bicyclist was at fault for darting into the crosswalk too fast for the driver to stop in time.

I speak from the point of view of someone who regularly walks, bikes, and drives in Boston; someone who strives to adhere to the law in all of those contexts; and someone who resents the many bicyclists who do not.

Sincerely,

Jonathan Kamens

Cost and incentives

Here are the incentives I’m taking advantage of in my solar panel installation project:

• 30% federal tax credit on the total cost of the system
• 15% state tax credit on the total cost of the system, capped at $1,000
• state Commonwealth Solar rebate based on the capacity of the system
• $750/kW base incentive
• $850/kW “adder” because my home’s assessed value is considered “moderate”
• Renew Boston rebate equal to 1/3 of the state rebate
• Solar Renewable Energy Credits, a.k.a., SRECs (pronounced “ess-recs”), through which the utility companies will pay me to produce solar energy for at least the next ten years
• Massachusetts law prohibits towns and cities from adding the value of installed solar panels to the assessed value of a home for 20 years after the panels are installed.
• Because my roof was too old and needed to be re-shingled before I could install the solar panels, I am able to include the cost of the re-shingling job in the total cost of the solar project, so I get the 30% federal tax credit on that as well.

In addition to the moderate home value “adder” for the state rebate, there’s also a moderate income “adder” of the same amount; you can only get one or the other of those, not both. There’s also a $100/kW “adder” if your system is built out of solar panels or inverters manufactured in Massachusetts, but my system doesn’t qualify for that adder (because of the size of my roof, I needed to use high-efficiency panels that aren’t manufactured in Massachusetts, and because of the shading conditions, I needed to use micro-inverters, ditto.)

Note that Commonwealth Solar rebate applications have been closed for “block 7,” the block of rebates my system is being installed under, but block 8 is scheduled to start taking applications in October 2011.

Note that the state and city rebates are taxable income. As the one hand giveth (tax credits), the other taketh away (tax on rebates). Go figure.

In terms of raw cost, a 5kW system (the size at which tax credits and rebates start to cap) can cost upwards of $30,000 before all of the incentives listed above.

What you need to qualify

Basically, you need to have a south-facing roof that is mostly unshaded. A little shade is OK, but if a shading analysis (the installer will do one) shows that your system will operate at less than 80% of maximum capacity overall, you won’t qualify for the Commonwealth Solar rebate. That’ll probably be moot, though, since in that situation it probably won’t be cost-effective for you to install a system anyway.

You need to have free space on the wall near the electrical panel in your basement to install the inverter (unless your system uses micro-inverters) and monitoring equipment.

What a solar panel system consists of

Solar panels

Obviously. When sun shines on the panels, they make DC electricity.

Inverters

One or more inverters convert the DC into AC that’s compatible with the electric grid.

If your roof gets very little shade, your system will probably have all the panels connected in series to a single inverter. If, however, your roof gets shade that varies across your roof, it’ll probably make more sense for your system to use micro-inverters, i.e., a little DC-to-AC inverter connected to each panel on the roof.

This is because if all the panels are serially connected to one big inverter, then the efficiency of the entire system will be limited to that of the least efficient (i.e., most shaded) panel, whereas with micro-inverters, different panels can operate at different efficiencies without dragging each other down.

Monitoring stuff

At a minimum, you’ll have a box in your basement, separate from your utility company meter, which keeps a running tally of how much electricity your system has generated. This is necessary so you can claim your SRECs.

However, you may also have access to more complex and powerful monitoring capabilities. For example the Enphase micro-inverters that will be installed in my system include extensive monitoring at no additional cost, and the installer I’m using also provides its own monitoring.

New electric meter

The electric company will install a new electric meter capable of handling net metering, described below.

Connection to your electric panel

Your inverter and/or micro-inverters will be connected to your home power grid. Any solar-generated power you don’t use will be fed back through the utility meter onto its grid, and you’ll get credited for it as described below.

External disconnect

There will be a box on the outside of your house containing a big rocker switch that the electric company can use to quickly disconnect your solar generation system from their grid. This is a safety precaution in case your inverter fails to shut down properly when the power goes out (see below).

What happens when the power goes out?

In a normal solar panel installation, you cannot use power from your solar panels when the utility company power is out. For safety reasons — to prevent your panels from feeding electricity back onto the grid and electrocuting workers trying to repair it — your system will detect when utility company power goes down and automatically shut itself down until the power comes back on.

Solar panel systems can be designed to charge batteries instead of feeding directly into your home electric grid. Such a system can be designed to automatically switch over to battery power when utility power goes down.

However, such systems are significantly more expensive and higher maintenance, and are almost certainly not worth the expense unless you live in a rural area where the power goes down often and/or for extended periods of time.

Payback

With all these incentives, a solar panel installation can easily pay for itself in only a few years. In my case, payback is going to take a bit longer, for two reasons:

• As noted above, I had to use high-efficiency panels and micro-inverters, both of which are more expensive; homes with more roof space and less shade than us would be able to get by with less expensive components.
• Also as noted above, my panels are going to be a bit shaded, so the system isn’t always going to be operating at maximum capacity.

I expect my system to entirely pay for itself, including paying back the interest on the money I am borrowing from my home equity line to pay for installing it, in well under ten years.

It is also worth noting that the preliminary data that’s available suggests that you get back >90% of the money spent on solar panels when you sell your home. Therefore, even if you move before your system pays for itself, the odds are that you’ll end up ahead.

Net metering

Included in my payback calculations is the electricity that the panels are producing. I expect my system to produce about half of the electricity that is used by my home in a year.

Home solar panel installations in Massachusetts are interconnected with the power grid, and electric utilities in Massachusetts are required by law to support “net metering.” What that means, in a nutshell, is that when I’m producing more electricity than my home is using, it gets fed back into the electric grid and my electric meter runs backward.

If I produce more electricity than I use in any given month, then my electric bill will show a credit instead of a balance due. That credit will offset future electric bills, but note that it’s not the same as cash — I can’t ask NStar to send me a check for it. It’s therefore not cost-effective to install solar panels with more capacity than your home needs over time.

Financing options

I’m buying my system outright. When it’s finished and turned on, I will own it and all the electricity and SRECs it generates.

Some of the solar installers offer various other financing and leasing options. I’m not going to get into them here. All I will say that if you have the money to pay outright for your system or you can borrow it for a low interest rate, you will definitely make out better in the end by buying your system rather than leasing it. Any installer who tells you otherwise is selling you a pack of lies and you should run, not walk, away from that installer and find a different one.

Warranty, maintenance, system lifetime

Commonwealth Solar requires any systems installed under its aegis to be warrantied for parts and labor for five years.

Solar panels are pretty plug-in-play, so the odds of one failing after the five-year burn-in period are quite low. Having said that, there’s always the possibility of failure, or indeed of a tree falling on your panels. This is the one thing that could reasonably be construed as an advantage of leasing — if someone else owns the system, and it breaks, then it’s their responsibility rather than yours to fix it. Having said that, the odds of this happening are sufficiently low that it doesn’t come close to justifying the significant decrease in ROI when you lease rather than buy.

The efficiency of solar panels degrades by 1-2% per year. Even after 50 years, the panels will still be producing a significant amount of electricity. After 20-30 years the panels on the market may be so much better that you’ll want to install new ones even though the old ones are still working. However, even if you’re too lazy to bother doing that, you’ll still continue to generate electricity and save money, and by that point the system will have paid for itself long ago, so it’s all gravy.

Inverters and micro-inverters tend to die before solar panels. Reputable installers will factor into their ROI calculations the cost of replacing your inverter(s) once during the lifetime of your system. Note, however, that inverters are getting better all the time. For example, the Enphase micro-inverters in my system have a 25-year warranty.

Solar installers I looked at

SunBug Solar

SunBug is the first installer I spoke with. They were my favorite from the start, and they were the ones I ended up choosing to install my system.

I spoke first with Ben Mayer. He spent a very long time on the phone with me, patiently answering my questions and educating me about everything. After that, Dan Covey came out to my home to do the site assessment. He, too, has been consistently knowledgeable, competent, and helpful.

SunBug is a small, local company. All of their installation work is performed by employees, not subcontractors, with the exception of the final electrical interconnection work, which is handled by a subcontracted electrician with whom they have a working relationship.

Small companies are often run in a chaotic and ad hoc fashion, but that does not seem to be the case with SunBug. They give the distinct impression of running a very tight ship.

SunBug originally proposed a system that was only half the capacity of the system proposed by Transformations Inc. I wanted the higher capacity system, but I was also feeling slightly more comfortable with SunBug than Transformations, so I asked SunBug if they could submit a second proposal for a higher capacity system. They did, and that’s the system we ended up going with.

By the way, SunBug offers a referral bonus, so if you contact them, please let them know I sent you!

Transformations Inc.

I liked Transformations, and they were my second choice if SunBug hadn’t worked out.

The guys I spoke with at Transformations seemed just slightly less “with it” than Ben and Dan at SunBug. It’s not like they made mistakes or anything like that; they seemed just a little bit less on the ball. When all was said and done, I felt just a little more comfortable with SunBug than with Transformations.

The other reason I chose SunBug over Transformations was because SunBug’s monitoring capabilities were more extensive, and that appealed to me.

For the record, I think Transformations would have done a perfectly good job if I had opted to use them instead of SunBug.

SolarCity

I recommend strongly against using SolarCity.

They’re a big, big, national company, and they act like it in all the stereotypical, bad ways.

They didn’t send a technical guy to do a site assessment. Instead, they sent a sales guy to give me a hard sell.

He handed me a proposal which he said up-front wasn’t final and wouldn’t be final until I signed on the dotted line. Only then would SolarCity’s engineers get involved in actually assessing the site and designing the system. If I didn’t like the result, I would be free to back out, but by then weeks would have been wasted and I probably would have missed the Commonwealth Solar block and ended up waiting months to try again with another installer in the next block.

He tried really, really hard to convince me that leasing was a better option than buying, even though it, well, isn’t. Under the terms of SolarCity’s leasing programs, homeowners can’t buy the system at the end of the lease — the only choices are signing a new lease, upgrading to a new system, or having SolarCity remove the system completely. Only a fool would enter into a deal like that.

As part of trying to convince me that leasing would be better than buying the system outright, he told me that the SREC program “could disappear tomorrow,” which would hurt me a lot financially if I bought the system outright, but wouldn’t hurt me at all if I leased. The problem is that it’s simply not true — the SREC program is pretty much guaranteed to be around for at least ten years after my system is installed. Either the salesman was totally clueless, or he was lying scum. Either way, no thanks, I’m not interested.

Alternate Energy

Steve Pitney at Alternate Energy seems like a nice guy, and he has a huge amount of experience in the solar energy business. However, he definitely seems to fit the “chaotic, ad hoc” small company stereotype, which made me pretty uncomfortable.

For one thing, he missed our scheduled site assessment appointment without calling to let me know.

When he did come and do the assessment, the system he proposed to install was one which I was fairly certain, from what I’d learned from the other installers, wouldn’t actually fit on our roof.

Furthermore, he didn’t see any need to use micro-inverters, even though both SunBug and Transformations were convinced that they were essential because of the shading conditions on my roof.

Steve said he could not quote a 5kW system for my roof without putting up weirdly angled panels on my dormer, even though SunBug and Transformations were both able to do so.

Steve’s quoted prices for the systems he was able to quote were in the same per-kW range as the quotes from the other installers, but his system didn’t include any web-based monitoring.

If Alternate Energy had been the only installer I spoke with, they probably would have done an OK job and I probably would have been happy with it. However, after speaking to multiple installers and educating myself, Alternate Energy definitely wasn’t the front-runner.

The steps in the process

Here, in a nutshell, is what it takes to get solar panels installed on your roof:

1. Assemble a list of candidate installers (in my case, the list was predetermined by the vendors certified for the Renew Boston rebate program).
2. Call them all. Chat with them on the phone. Make site assessment appointments with the ones you’re comfortable with.
3. Wait for them to submit proposals to you after the site assessments.
4. Compare and contrast the proposals. Ask hard questions. Pick an installer.
5. Do tons of paperwork. Put down a deposit.
6. Wait about six weeks for Commonwealth Solar to approve your rebate. The installer can’t start work until the rebate is approved.
7. While you’re doing that, get your roof re-shingled if the installer told you it needs to be done before solar panels are installed. Make sure the roofer removes the old shingles rather than putting new ones over them; with the weight of solar panels on your roof, you don’t want the weight of extra shingles as well. How to find a decent roofer is beyond the scope of this document.
8. Once the rebate is approved, give another chunk of money to the installer so they can order all the materials.
9. You and the installer wait a few weeks for the building department to get around to approving the project and for the all the materials to arrive. The building department will probably take longer than the materials (at least, that seems to be the case in Boston).
10. The installer does the installation work.
11. Wait for the city to come inspect. The inspection is coordinated and supervised by the installer.
12. Wait for the electric utility to come inspect. Again, the inspection is coordinated and supervised by the installer.
13. The installer turns on the system, and you start saving money on your electric bill.
14. Once a month, report how much electricity your system generated through the web site that manages SRECs.
15. When you’ve generated enough electricity to produce an SREC, the web site will broker a sale of the SREC and deposit cash in your bank account.

Some sleuthing on my part and help from people on the Web revealed that the most likely explanation for what was going on was that the Social Security Administration was using a software package from Semaphore Corporation to perform address canonicalization. To be clear, the evidence behind this theory was purely circumstantial — the SSA was canonicalizing my address wrong, and Semaphore Corp.’s software canonicalizes my address wrong in the same way.

Semaphore was notified in August 2005 that their software was canonicalizing my address and others incorrectly. As noted in my original story, their ridiculous response was:

The USPS has a large number of esoteric rules about which ZIP+4 to match when the address-city-state-ZIP inputs are incomplete or conflicting and ambiguous, and rules don’t even exist for many cases, so you’ll continue to see the logic evolve as CASS changes to include more of the above situations.

There are two reasons why their response was ridiculous:

1. The U.S. Postal Service (USPS) is by definition the authority on address canonicalization, and they canonicalize it correctly when given exactly the same input that Semaphore canonicalizes incorrectly.
2. Neither I nor anyone else was able to find a single other web site or software package that canonicalizes my address the way Semaphore’s software does — everything else out there canonicalizes it the same way the USPS does.

I originally posted my story in August 2005. Tonight, six years after I first posted it, I received a long, convoluted email message from an unnamed individual at Semaphore which can be briefly summarized as follows:

• “Our software is still broken.”
• “We’re still not going to admit that it’s broken…”
• “…because we’re too stupid to understand that if our software behaves differently from the USPS’s own software and differently from every other software package in the world that does address canonicalization, that means ours is wrong and everybody else’s is right.”

But you don’t have to trust me. Below is their email message in full, with some commentary from me.

My wife and I have lived at [elided] in Brighton since 1997. At least a third of the residential units on our block are rental units, most of which are rented to a different set of Boston College students each year. Some years are good: the students are respectful of the neighborhood, keep the noise down, and keep things clean. Some years are bad: the students host loud, rowdy, outdoor parties until all hours of the night; get drunk; throw plastic cups, beer bottles and cans everywhere; throw up or urinate in the street; set off fireworks under cars; etc.

Although we never know what we’re going to get in terms of students, we do have a pretty good idea of what we are going to get from the police department, which is that when we call the department at 2:00am on a Sunday morning because the students are playing Denis Leary’s “Cause I’m an Asshole” at top volume out of an open window, drunkenly screaming along, and waking up the entire neighborhood, and we call 911 and ask for someone to come do something about it, the odds are that nobody is going to show up.

About a week and a half ago, one of the students living on our block for the summer approached me as I was leaving my car and said the following: “Hi. You live across the street, right? Some of my friends are in a blues band, and we’re hoping to have them do a little performance from our porch on Saturday afternoon. We wanted to check with the neighbors to make sure it’s OK. Is that OK with you?”

I told him that my wife and I liked music and had no problem at all with a daytime performance. I was very impressed that he took the time to check with me and (I assume) our other neighbors.

On Saturday afternoon the band, Original Gravity, showed up and started playing. My wife and I were sitting on our porch very much enjoying the free concert, when, after only a few songs, not one but two D-14 police cruisers showed up. After the police spoke for a few minutes with the student who had previously spoken to us, the band announced that they had been ordered to end the concert, and that was the end of it.

After the police left, I went over and asked the band members what had happened. They said that someone had called the police and complained. They also said that the city requires a permit for a live band performance, and they didn’t have one, so the police ordered them to stop playing. Finally, they said that they had called city hall all week trying to get just such a permit, and no one had returned any of their calls.

The band was no louder than a loud stereo would have been. It was good music, and it wasn’t hurting anybody.

It’s simply mind-boggling to me that the same police who can’t be troubled to show up when a drunken party is disturbing the peace on our block at 2:00am, have no trouble at all showing up within a few minutes to shut down a relatively quiet party, with good music, in the middle of the day, on the basis of a single complaint from a single sourpuss resident.

It’s also incomprehensible that these students don’t need a permit to hold a raucus, alcohol-driven party at all hours of the night, but they do need one to have some friends play some live music on their porch in the middle of the day. Asinine doesn’t begin to cover it.

The band wasn’t a public nuisance, but shutting it down certainly was. I assure you that my wife and I do not believe that our quality of life was improved by the policemen’s actions.

Sincerely,

Jonathan Kamens

The commenter gave the name “Diane Pearce Votes for Obama Again” and linked to my.barackobama.com. I thought it was slightly weird, but not weird enough to merit further investigation.

Then, three hours later, another comment came in on a different blog posting, this time from “Diane Pearce Loves Barack Obama”: “All I know is that I work at a large Pharmaceutical corporation in Clayton NC and I endroce Barack Obama with all my being. I would love for all my friends and colleagues to re-elect Obama in 2012!! I LOVE YOU OBAMA.”

That exceeded my weirdness threshold, so I looked into it a bit further.

The two comments gave two different email addresses, Reitter@gmail.com and Lipovsky@gmail.com, both of which appear to be based on people’s names and neither of which is related to the full name given by the commenter.

One of the comments was posted from an IP address in the United Arab Emirates. The other was posted from Indonesia.

I Googled for pages matching “Diane Pearce” and Obama, and there were 264 matches, many of which were similar comments. I did the same Google search a half hour later, and the count was up to 270.

Someone is clearly astroturfing here. The motives for this, and whether the people doing it are in reality trying to help or hurt Obama, are left as an exercise to the reader.

Diane Pearce Votes for Obama Again my.barackobama.com Reitter@gmail.com 86.96.226.22

What a relief to see our elected officials finally getting tough on the aid recipients who spent 0.002% of last year’s welfare funds on underwear (“Pol gets tough on welfare abuse“, Feb. 15).

How dare these women buy high-quality, inexpensive undergarments from Victoria’s Secret? Wal-Mart should be perfectly fine for poor people. Or maybe they should make do without underwear; if beggars wandering the streets half-naked in rags was good enough for our ancestors, it should be good enough for us.

It’s even more outrageous that some of these women are shopping at outlet stores. If they’re going to use taxpayer money on underwear, the least they could do is pay full price.

Sincerely,

Jonathan Kamens

(Simulblogged.)

Many sidewalks in Allston-Brighton still buried in snow – Allston-Brighton, MA – Allston/Brighton TAB

Good for the TAB for doing some real, honest-to-goodness journalism! In recognition, I’ve just subscribed to the TAB.

February 1, 2011

Mayor Thomas M. Menino
1 City Hall Square, Suite 500
Boston, MA 02201-2013
mayor@cityofboston.gov
(617) 635-4500

Dear Mayor Menino,

On the brink of yet another major snowstorm, I am writing to complain about how incredibly bad the city’s handling of the snow has been this winter.

1. Neighborhood streets all over the city are overwhelmed with snow. There’s no place for residents to put new snow even if they want to do the right thing while shoveling. There’s no place for people to park their cars. Other cities in the area, such as Waltham, have recognized the problem and are removing snow from neighborhood streets, not just main arteries. Why isn’t Boston? (examples: Foster Street in Brighton between Surrey and Washington Streets; and Leamington Road in Brighton)
2. The city has been too slow even about removing snow from main arteries, let alone neighborhood streets. An MBTA transit alert that went out last week, between storms, was particularly telling: “All Bus Routes are experiencing 20-25 min delays due to snow banks impeding the roadway.”
3. Pedestrian islands and squares, which are essential for pedestrian safety when driver visibility is impeded by snow-banks, haven’t merely been left unshoveled; in some cases plows have added huge piles of snow. (examples: the intersection of Wirt and Washington Streets in Brighton, and the intersection of Milk and Kilby Streets downtown)
4. Code enforcement has been nonexistent. I’ve been opening cases through Citizens Connect for five days about improperly shoveled sidewalks on my block. None of those cases have been closed; none of the violators have been cited; none of the improperly shoveled sidewalks have been fixed. If the snow blocking those sidewalks hasn’t completely frozen by now, it probably will during the impending storm, which means it’ll be next to impossible for responsible property owners to remove it even if they want to. By not citing the property owners promptly after the storm, the city has ensured that residents will be stuck navigating unshoveled sidewalks for weeks or even months. Not to mention how angry it makes residents who spend hours shoveling their sidewalks properly only to see their neighbors flaunt the law and get away with it unscathed.
5. There are still parking space “markers” on my block five days after the end of the last storm, despite the 48-hour rule. I’ve opened cases about these as well, and again, nothing has been done. Yesterday’s trash pickup was a prime opportunity for the markers to be removed as the city’s Web site claims they would be, but it wasn’t done. Residents like me who follow the rule and stop marking our spaces 48 hours after a storm are just out of luck — other people have claimed our spaces with markers of their own, and now we have no place to park (see point 1 above). Making rules that you don’t enforce encourages a mindset of flaunting the law and harms the residents who follow them. Get rid of the rule, change it, or start enforcing it.
6. Curb cuts all over the city are not just unshoveled; many of them are blocked by huge snow-banks created by city plows. This is dangerous to able-bodied pedestrians, but more importantly, it makes the city impassable to the disabled and is therefore unquestionably a violation of the ADA. The city is required by federal law to keep sidewalks useable for the disabled year-round. Is it going to take a lawsuit from a group of disabled plaintiffs to force the city to abide by the law? Is “We’ll only do it if there’s a court order” the standard of behavior you want your administration to be known for?

Mr. Mayor, I know that the amount of snow this year has been virtually unprecedented. I am sure figuring out how to deal with it has been a huge challenge for you and the responsible department heads. I would like to think that you are trying your best to do the right thing, but at this point I’m left with the suspicion that what you’re really trying your best to do is spend as little money as possible on snow for the rest of the winter. If so, then I suggest you change your attitude, or you will find that I and many other residents will not remember this winter fondly come the next election.

Sincerely,

Jonathan Kamens

Cc: Neighborhood Liaison Daniel Roan
Cc: Press Secretary Dot Joyce
Cc: Councilor Mark Ciommo
Cc: Councilor Stephen Murphy
Cc: Councilor Felix Arroyo
Cc: Councilor John Connolly
Cc: Councilor Ayanna Pressley
Cc: The Boston Globe
Cc: The Boston Herald
Cc: The Allston-Brighton TAB
Cc: http://blog.kamens.us/snow2010
Cc: www.universalhub.com
Cc: allstonbrighton2006@googlegroups.com