We've been waiting since Christmas to use this cool new blue sled of Katherine's, and we finally got the chance yesterday after the Tufts Traveling Treasure Trunk show. We went to a friends house and made us a sledding run on a slope in the backyard.

 

I had to pull the kids down a couple of times to pack the snow down. Katherine road in front on her new sled, and really got frosted. She has specifically asked me to go out and get her a pair of pink goggles and a pink scarf so that she can avoid "the freezees." But I have to say, she did very well, even going down all by herself a few times. This is probably the first real trip downhill she's done. I'm not sure why it took this long - something seems to come up every time we've planned this outing. And of course, it's not just something you can run out and do, you know? There's a lot of clothes involved.

We had quite a day today. We met some friends at the Seafood Depot in West Medford Square, had a nice lunch, and then went over to the West Medford Congregational Church for the Tufts Traveling Treasure Trunk. It was way cool. If any of my local readers were there, well, I was obviously the one with the camera. I was also the one that had to haul my daughter out of the room halfway through and give her a timeout about 10 seconds or so after I took this picture.

Anyway, the Tufts folks were great! They did a 40 or so minute show and had lots of costumes and very kid-friendly material. As you can see, the kids loved it. There were active parts, and quiet parts, and it was just really fun.

 

 

I thought the performers were a lot of fun - here's some of them hamming it up.

 

The other cool thing about this event, although it may have backfired on me with Katherine, was that they sold cookies and other stuff. A hat was passed around (I didn't actually see it, my wife took care of it), and all the money will be donated to charity (I can't remember which one).

 

OK, it's late and I have to get to bed. We went sledding after this, by the way, so I hope to get that and a new Alex photo up soon, but I warn you, it's seriously busy around here. Katherine got me up at 6:09 this morning, and between him and Alex, I didn't free up until around 10:15PM. That's a long day.

We had a nice little President's Day snowstorm - about five inches or so when all was said and done. So I was waiting with great interest to see if the Massachusetts Department of Conservation (DCR) would plow the Mystic Lakes trail again. As you can clearly see here, they did. This is one of three Bombardiers the DCR runs for snow removal. They also utilize five Bobcats and 23 snowblowers. I'll explain those facts and the sources behind them in a moment. They parked the truck off Mystic Valley Parkway (MVP) in Winchester across from the sports field behind the library, and ran the Bombardier along MVP to the Route 60 traffic circle, then up 2A to 3A, then back down and along the Arlington bank of the Mystic River and along route 16. I lost track of it somewhere in there. The only reason I checked that out is that I wanted to know if it came back over the same areas, plowing the lakes trail twice. It was a very unusual circumstance. I had a very short break in my domestic duties, and was heading down MVP to Winchester to do some quick errands and I ran into it. So I hauled out my camera and followed it for awhile. The driver probably figured I was doing it because of the flap over Kathy Abbott.

 

 

I'm not sure why I get so aggravated over this. I guess it's because I feel like this is personal for me. I've been documenting and photographing trash and other dumping at the lakes for over six months now, and the last thing I expected was for the state to be part of the problem of the health of this watershed.

 

Now for the other part of the story. A few weeks ago, there was an inquiry into the snow removal practices of the DCR. I obtained notes from that meeting from a fellow member of the Yahoo!Group for Medford, MA. I won't name that individual, but I am very thankful for such wonderful notes. Present at the meeting were Ellen Herzfelder, Secretary of the Office of Environmental Affairs (OEA) and Steven Pritchard, acting director of the DCR.

 

Herzfelder maintained vigorously that the accident involving the four high school students was the results of "serious operations failures" at the DCR, for which Kathy Abbott was asked to resign. She was very evasive, however, on the issue of whether or not the DCR had adequate resources to provide effective snow removal on sidewalks. State Senator Jarrett Barrios (D-Middlesex, Suffolks, and Essex District) eventually got her to affirm that she believed the DCR had the appropriate resources to do the job (Pritchard later said the same thing directly). As it turns out, the cause of the accident was determined to be "impeded operation of a motor vehicle" by the Massachusetts State Police. The driver of the pickup was distracted by his two year old daughter, who was in the cab of the truck. Sure, the kids were walking in the street, but this appears to be part of a larger problem of the bus routes and crosswalks in that particular area.

 

According to Pritchard and Herzfelder, the DCR has 900 miles of sidewalk to plow with the above equipment (there was additional equipment mentioned, but it was not in usable condition). They contend that there was no strategic plan to deal with sidewalk snow removal, and Herzfelder mentioned that she thought Kathy Abbott had done an otherwise excellent job.

 

As you may recall, Governor Mitt Romney make a point of saying that he was transferring street plowing for about 18% of the DCR parkways to the Massachusetts Highway Department (MHD) because of the dismal performance of the DCR. However, this turns out to be a very misleading statement. Senator Barrios pointed out in the inquiry that it was in fact Kathy Abbott who signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) between the MHD and the DCR the day before the accident occurred. It is also worth noting that the MHD only provides snow removal from "curb-to-curb", in other words, they don't do sidewalks. Barrios wryly observed that the agreement would be one that benefited those that live in Belmont (home of Romney) and Hull (home of republican state senator Robert L. Hedlund). Romney just took the agreement and pushed it into practice using executive privilege to skip the legislative approval process. Too bad Kathy Abbott didn't have that option, eh? For a more, um, biased look at why Mitt Romney asked for Kathy Abbott's resignation, check out the Romney is a Fraud blog.

 

There is a funding issue here that also points to a resource problem at the DCR. Larry Dorman, the head of operations at the DCR, put in a budget request for an additional $1.6M for captial expenditures including snow removal equipment. The request was granted, but the OEA took $1.2M for operational expenses. Pritchard stated that this wasn't going to be an issue because there was money already set aside for DCR capital expenditures. That's one of those howler moments. Of course the DCR has a capital budget. They were asking for an increase, and OEA took 75% of it away.

 

I think we will know empirically whether or not the DCR has enough resource by simply watching for the rest of the winter. Sidewalk clearing is very different from street clearing, especially when it comes to DCR properties. For one thing, the sidewalks are not contiguous. You have to put the Bombardiers and Bobcats on trucks and send them out to different locations. It also doesn't make sense to clear sidewalks until after the snow has fallen, which puts their progress well behind street clearing. A reasonable position would be that there is a one day lag between having the streets clear and the sidewalks clear. This week, while the roads were clear on Tuesday morning, it wasn't until Wednesday morning that the Bombardier showed up. However, given that school was not in session, the DCR probably wouldn't work the same overtime schedule. I would also point out that 900 miles is a lot of territory for the 30 or so pieces of equipment that the DCR uses, especially when 23 of those pieces of equipment are snowthrowers.

 

By the way, I contacted the DCR about the problem of plowing the Mystic Lakes trails. I spoke with the office of community affairs, who promised to call back with an answer (they didn't), and left a message for the department spokesperson (who never returned my call).

 

I'll try again and maybe even send them a good old fashioned letter, then it's time to meet my state representative. Stay tuned, it should be fun.

It can't be good when the police show up at your house, look around your garage, take out a notebook, and start writing things down. Police visits to my neighbor have happened before, but this guy went inside and talked to someone for quite some time, then came out, pulled the car into the driveway, and went back in again. It almost looked like he was writing a ticket, but clearly there's got to be more to it than that. *sigh*. It's such a nice neighborhood.

Remember I told you yesterday that the Massachusetts Department of Conservation (DCR) was plowing trails by the Mystic Lakes? Here's the photo to prove it. Steve Pritchard now runs the agency after Governor Mitt Romney (R) fired Kathy Abbott. This is probably one of those stories that will just drift away, and it really shouldn't. Many of the environmental groups in Massachusetts actually liked Kathy Abbott, and thought she was doing a great job on conservation of the environment. Can you imagine that? Environmental activist groups actually respecting the primary state agency of their concern? What a loss.

 

 

So anyway, if you read that article, you noticed a few things. First, a bunch of kids were walking in the street in West Roxbury when they were hit by a pickup truck. The street was in DCR territory, therefore their plowing responsibility. Although the article is very unclear about what actually happened (were the sidewalks clear or not, what was the root cause of the accident, etc.), Mitt asked for Kathy's resignation and got it. What appears to have happened is that Steve became the acting director and probably said, "plow every sidewalk ASAP or else." And then this is what happens. The order was somehow interpreted as plow a path on the side of every road that DCR controls, including roadside trails like this one by the lower Mystic Lake in Medford on Mystic Valley Parkway.

 

 

What makes this even more annoying is that this is not a pedestrian road to anywhere. There are no students walking to school on this road. And even when the path is clear, people often walk in the street because the trail is rough, occasionally muddy, and so forth.

 

This trail should not be plowed. If the DCR continues to plow it like this, they will be the single largest active threat to the health of this bank of the lower Mystic Lake. That sure puts the con in conservation don't you think?