Clean sweep
South End News, Thursday, November 01, 2007
By Justin A. Rice

On Oct. 15 the city towed 340 cars to pave the way for street sweepers. A little less than half of those cars — 143 of them — were plucked off of the streets within District 2 City Councilor Bill Linehan’s neighborhoods.

“It just seems over the top, unless I have all the bad people,” Linehan told a panel of Department of Public Works officials while chairing an Oct. 29 hearing in the City and Neighborhood Services Committee that took stock of a pilot-towing program implemented last year.

Joseph Canavan, superintendent of Boston’s Public Works Department, said towing is down 14 percent since the program’s initial surge. But he added that the towing program has resulted in streets that are 75 percent cleaner than they were before the city began aggressively towing cars.

“If you remove this program you might as well put the sweepers away,” Canavan said. “Why would you pay for sweepers?” South End resident Marleen Nienhuis of West Newton Street testified that the program was working.

“Unless you tow there’s not going to be a good program,” she told South End News. “I haven’t seen the streets as clean as they are now.”

The 15-year South End resident organizes a neighborhood clean up twice a year and last time out, she said, the impact of the towing program made her job much easier.

“I can tell you the difference,” she said of decreased debris in the streets. “In the spring, [clean up] was minor, last fall it was a nightmare.” (The pilot program went into effect in 2006 near summer’s end.)

During the three-hour hearing, At-large City Councilor Michael Flaherty expressed his pleasure with public officials for having a willingness to tweak the program and work with residents and the City Council.

“It’s very refreshing to see the department has a pilot program and is working out the kinks and is looking for suggestions,” Flaherty said. “Often at these hearings your get ‘We’re doing this, we’re doing that, we’re doing the best we can.” Still, Flaherty wondered why Public Works can’t clean one neighborhood per day instead of cleaning different sides of a street on different days.

“One of the reasons I was brought here [from Denver last year] was to change the way we do business in Boston,” said Dennis Royer, chief of transportation and public works. “So for you to say, ‘Can we change it?’ The answer is ‘Yes.’” Royer said he’d like to see trash removal, recycling and street cleaning all done on the same day in any given neighborhood so residents would have an easier time keeping it straight.

“That would make it easy to remember,” he said. “The problem is we’re caught between the existing history of the programs. In some neighborhoods street cleaning is done one, two and three times a week. We’re gonna have to take it neighborhood by neighborhood and develop programs. That’s what I’m trying to do.

“I don’t think there’s a huge difference between what you want to see done and what we want to see done, we’re just sitting on different sides of the chamber.”

Steve Fox of Rutland Square said he likes the consistency of the current program as opposed to a prior one that rotated street cleaning routes.

“We call it Wednesday morning fire drill,” he said of the current street cleaning day on his street. “This is the first year it’s actually had an impact on street cleaning.”

Fox attributes that to the fact that street cleaning fines, which were raised last year from $25 ticket to $40, didn’t work. He said raised ticket prices didn’t prevent construction workers renovating old Victorian brownstones from keeping their vehicles parked in the same spot all day.

“They’re willing to eat the ticket but they’re not willing to eat the tow,” he said.

Flaherty said he’d like to see the city use more “compassion” when towing vehicles and said signage displaying street cleaning days is unclear and it would be helpful if the street cleaning window was decreased from four hours to maybe one hour. He also pointed to a hypothetical example of a mother with two kids on the way to school running out to find her car being towed.

Flaherty’s office reported that from April 15 to Oct. 28 the city has towed more than 27,000 cars, approximately 239 a month for a total revenue of $3 million. But the city only nets a $10 transactional fee for each car towed or $274,000. Private tow companies receive $100 for each car, a $2.7 million pot that has created cutthroat competition and cut corners. Three tow companies have been suspended and one fired for unjustly taking cars back to their lot.

“At $110 a car, the drivers try to get as many as they can because now it has become so lucrative,” Flaherty said. “[They use] flatbeds, why tow one car when you can tow three cars.”

Flaherty said tow truck drivers are known to speed and drive the wrong way down streets searching for illegally parked vehicles and that there have also been incidents of cars being towed intentionally after the sweeper finishes a street. Canavan said this practice isn’t tolerated and they installed GPS systems on the sweepers to track when a street is finished. They can tell if a car was ticketed or towed after the fact and refund fines if that was the case.

Canavan said Public Works is using PA systems to announce street cleaning and they have heavily flyered neighborhoods with reminders to move cars. They also investigate every complaint about a towed car. At-large City Councilor Sam Yoon has in the past suggested that the city implement a text-messaging program that would remind residents the night before their street is to be cleaned.

Another problem has been tow truck drivers who illegally charge drop fees, Flaherty said, meaning that when someone arrives as their car is tagged the driver asks for money not to tow the vehicle. But Boston Police Sergeant Kenneth Lamb testified that he’s recently conducted stings to try to catch drivers in the act and has found them to be in compliance with city rules. Even so, Flaherty argued for a standard drop fee that would take the power out of the toe drivers’ hands and save people unnecessary trips to the tow lot.

“I’m just looking at the human side,” Flaherty said. “If someone shows up on the scene it doesn’t make sense to have them follow the car to the tow lot.”