District 6 City Councillor Giovanni Recupero has seen improvements in the city’s response to broken streetlights in Chelsea, and wants the administration to keep up the work.
Last month, Recupero filed a council order asking the city to look into hiring a new company to perform all streetlight repairs in Chelsea.
At the time, Recupero said he wasn’t sure the city would actually move forward with hiring a new company, but said he hoped his order would light a fire to get a quicker response to keeping the city lit up.
At Monday night’s meeting, the council received a letter from public works commissioner Cate Fox-Lent responding to Recupero’s order.
“The City of Chelsea has more than 2,000 streetlights that are of several different styles and vintages,” Fox-Lent stated. “Although we have recently replaced many of the fixtures with LEDs, there are many other causes of failure including issues with the control mechanism, the above ground wiring and the below ground wiring. Our contractor is in Chelsea nearly every week to respond to requests, some of which are straightforward and some of which take more than one trip to diagnose and repair.”
Fox-Lent stated that she understands that members of the council and public are concerned about streetlight outages and the contractor’s response time in repairing them.
“However, the DPW is also involved as we need to follow up on the reports from the public to gather more information before contacting the contractor,” stated Fox-Lent. “In my role as the Commissioner of Public Works, I see opportunities to improve our internal processes for how we document outages and communicate them to the contractor. I believe that focusing on internal improvements can alleviate much of the concern and I can assure you I will oversee this effort directly.”
Fox-Lent said she recommended pursuing the process improvement first before looking into hiring a different contractor.
“Today, I saw them fixing some lights on Broadway, so that means we must have lit some kind of fire under management,” said Recupero.
Recupero said he hopes there is a continued focus on fixing the streetlights and that there are no further issues.