At least one alderman has expressed displeasure with the performance of the city's Street Department and is asking the council to recommend that Mayor Shirley Washington change out the leadership of the department.
Steven Mays, alderman in the city's Fourth Ward, has sponsored a resolution that was placed into the aldermen's packets this week in advance of Monday's City Council meeting that would express a vote of no confidence in Rick Rhoden, the director of the Street Department, and would encourage the mayor to replace him.
"As you know, I've always been about the streets and helping the people, you know, grass roots," Mays said Wednesday. "Our streets are not organized in a fashion to get fixed in the time it takes to get the streets fixed and repaired. Now, a lot of our streets, they're just dangerous. They're terrible."
Mays said he has made numerous calls about various locations in the city that appear to be constant trouble spots but said the city is still falling behind in making repairs.
"Take down on Cherry Street, for instance," Mays said. "Sixth and Cherry, 16th and Cherry, 10th and Cherry, 46th and Olive. I just happened to stay on them to fix 14th and Bois D'Arc, they finally fixed that after about three years, but it's taking too long to fix our streets."
Mays said he gets a lot of calls from his constituents in the Fourth Ward at all times of day or night, but particularly, in the evenings after people are getting off from work, he said.
"They may hit a pothole out of the clear blue," he said. "They hit the pothole and they tear their rims up, tear their cars up. I get a lot of complaints about the roads and you know me, I've been complaining abut our streets for a long time."
Mays said many of the potholes he finds to be the worst offenders are those that are repeat offenders; potholes, he said, keep reappearing in the same places, time after time, despite repeated attempts to fix them.
"We can't just keep fixing the same ones year after year," he said. "It slows up progress."
Rhoden had little to say about the controversy, but did say that Mays' criticism toward the Street Department failed to take into consideration some of the obstacles he has had to deal with.
Storms that hit the area several times during the year left storm debris that the Street Department had to deal with, Rhoden said, which put the department behind on its street overlay schedule.
"We've been patching potholes, true enough," Rhoden said. "But that's just a temporary fix."
Washington said she tried to persuade Mays not to put the proposed resolution into the council packet, and said she had spoken to City Attorney Althea Hadden-Scott and Deputy Attorney Joe Childers and asked both to hold off writing such resolutions.
"I try to get the attorneys to not prepare that stuff that just doesn't make good sense, but they say they have to," Washington said. "So I called the Municipal League and they said they have to. In any case, I tried to talk him into pulling that, and I told him we're working on some things over there in the Street Department and he told me, 'No, no, we're not pulling it because the streets are just terrible.'"
Washington said that Mays has long wanted Rhoden out of the job of Street Department supervisor.
"It's a personal beef that he has. The streets aren't like we want them, sure," Washington said. "But Rick has a lot of institutional knowledge, and he's a hard worker. Anytime you put him on something, he gets the job done, and what I've been doing is I've been trying to work with Rick to try to find somebody to come in and make him a good assistant so that he can bring someone in and train them to carry on."
Alderman Ivan Whitfield said that he has heard complaints regarding the Street Department but said nothing he has heard rises to the level of making a change in department leadership necessary. He said, however, the Public Works Committee, of which Mays is a member, may have received additional information in the matter.
Alderman Bruce Lockett, chairman of the Public Works Committee, which does oversee the Street Department, said he isn't convinced the problem lies with the leadership of the department, but may be partially driven by a lack of resources, which he said has led to the department finding itself over-extended in the past.
"We've had a lot of strange weather, a lot of water and wind," Lockett said. "We've got some capacity issues with having enough heavy equipment operators; it's a lot to it."
Lockett suggested performing an evaluation of how effective the Street Department currently is in keeping up with needed infrastructure repairs and making decisions from there, rather than replacing the head of the department without a full picture of what challenges the department faces in doing its job.
