A Call for Sweeping Change

On Monday, in his monthly report to the Common Council, Rob Perry, superintendent of Public Works, shared this picture taken during annual maintenance on the digestors at the waste water treatment plant.

What's being cleaned off the walls is grit. Perry reported that 45 yards of grit had to be removed and hauled away. The process takes several days and costs more than $30,000. The grit comes not from the sanitary sewer but from the streets, and Perry noted that there would be much more grit in the digestors, and removing it would have to be done far more often and cost the City a great deal more money, were it not for the city's street sweeping program. 

The picture below was shared by Perry a few years ago. As he explained then, each pile represents one load from one night of street sweeping.

The street sweeping program is what makes the alternate side rules for overnight parking necessary. In 2021, Jane Trombley, then an alderman from the First Ward, chaired an ad hoc committee formed to study (and hopefully eliminate) alternate side of the street parking, which she maintained was "a real pain." In that exercise, the need for street sweeping triumphed, and overnight alternate side parking rules remain in effect.

Now there is a new challenge to the City's long-established street sweeping program.

At last night's Planning Board meeting, the developers working with the Hudson Housing Authority presented their latest plan for parking at the proposed new development. 

The notion of closing State Street between Second Street and what might have been First Street (were First Street to be extended from Columbia to State as originally suggested) to create a kind of plaza between the buildings in the HHA campus has been abandoned.   

Instead, to create enough parking to accommodate the units in both Phase 1 and Phase 2 of the project, the HHA planners are factoring in onstreet parking on both sides of State Street, and they want the Department of Public Works to alter its street sweeping schedule--to sweep the street in the daytime instead of in the wee hours of the morning--to allow HHA tenants to park overnight on both sides of State Street. John Canning, who was presenting the parking plan to the Planning Board, characterized the change in the street sweeping pattern as something the City must do to provide affordable housing and asked the Planning Board for its support. He also warned. "If you want more [offstreet] parking, it will take away from the green space."

It seemed to be suggested that this change could be accomplished by a resolution passed by the Common Council. It will be interesting to see how this all plays out.

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