In Mineola, snow removal in eye of beholder

Richard Tedesco

The Village of Mineola and some residents disagreed at last week’s village board meeting about the way the village Department of Public Works handled snow and garbage removal after the post-Christmas blizzard.

Village of Mineola Mayor Lawrence Werther praised the DPW efforts, along with other board members.

“You and your team did a phenomenal job,”Werther told Mineola DPW Superintendent Thomas Rini. “The village streets were well plowed.”

But several residents criticized the DPW’s effort and the village’s management of garbage removal in the blizzard’s aftermath.

“I think you missed the ball on this one,” resident Rick Ueland said at the Jan. 5 meeting. “There are still streets emergency vehicles can’t get down. We’re well over a week out and some street aren’t dug out.”

Ueland said there were still accumulations of a foot on side streets that intersect Jericho, including Marcellus Road and Wellington Road.

“Everybody’s sitting up there saying we did a great job,” Ueland said. “Has anybody been out there?”

“I can put them back out there and plow everyone back in. Is that what you want me to do?” Rini retorted. “I have 13 people. I don’t have an army.”

Ueland conceded that the DPW did a “phenomenal job” in the beginning, but said the village needed to do a “better job” in the future.

The DPW effort started with salting the roads as the snow started coming down heavily that Sunday afternoon, followed by 13 plow trucks and two front loaders dispatched at 6 p.m. that evening for a run that continued into late Monday night, according to Rini.

“The guys were in for 28 hours straight,” he said. The amount of snow and the snow coming down – literally horizontally – made it very difficult.”

Rini said he was advised by the county that it was pulling its plows in at 9 p.m. Sunday night, but said he made the decision to keep Mineola’s plows on the job. Crews took a three-hour break at 2 a.m. on Monday, and then resumed their work. Visibility became a serious problem, nearly causing one of the Mineola trucks to hit a white truck parked on Jericho Turnpike, Rini said. Cars were buried in the drifts and the plows couldn’t “feel” the curbs, he said.

“It got a little hairy. To our amazement, there were people walking in the street and we couldn’t even see them,” Rini said.

Many of the calls the DPW received were from residents complaining about unplowed county roads. Rini said there were two buses stuck on 1st Street early Monday morning, and the Mineola DPW trucks plowed 1st and 2nd Streets, which fall under the county’s jurisdiction.

“They got behind the eight ball on this,” Rini said of the county’s side of the clean-up.

The total cost of the snow removal effort was $26,500, comprising $13,500 for DPW workers’ overtime and $13,000 for salt, all of that to be reimbursed by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, according to Rini.

Village resident Nancy Desorbo complained that garbage put out by businesses in the village had not been picked up on the successive holiday weekends.

“Now you had this garbage all over the road. It’s a disgrace,” she said. “This is unsightly, unsanitary and unsafe.”

Werther said part of the problem is the way businesses put out their garbage.

Rini said the village has never picked up garbage on Saturdays and the businesses acted improperly.

“Many of these businesses have facilities for refrigeration of garbage. They shouldn’t have been putting it out there,” he said.

Village resident David Keefe said many businesses had been negligent about cleaning their sidewalks. Resident Bill Urianek said a gas station on Emory Street had plowed snow from its property out onto the street.

Village attorney John Spellman said he had already consulted with Rini to give flyers to those who plowed snow back onto the street. In his report on the storm, Rini said that businesses plowing snow into the street had become “an increasing problem.”

After consulting with Werther during the storm, Rini said the decision was taken to not issue tickets to vehicles parked on the streets, which poses another impediment to snow removal operations.

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