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| City services are services that you pay for through your taxes (and increasingly thorugh extra and more costly fees). Are you getting your moneys worth? Let us know. We will document the good and the bad and keep you updated with what we learn. It is your money you should demand good service. You should demand value for your dollar! |
| This is a test. See if you can pass this test because the city's solid waste workers were not able to. Look at the two pictures below. They are pictures of the same brush piled on a neighborhood street. Now for the test. What is wrong with the pile? Obviously there is something wrong because the city would not picked it up. Read below the pictures to get your answer. |
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| The answer is that nothing is wrong with the brush pile. Absolutely nothing. The branches are cut to the right length and they do not exceed the city's limit on diameter. In fact they are much smaller than the city's guidelines. This brush pile was placed on the curb on April 20, 2011. Trash pick up for this West District resident is on Friday. This particular week Good Friday fell on Friday, April 22 so there was no trash service. The following Friday on April 29, 2011, the resident was told over the phone that the city was backed up because of the holiday but it would be picked up on Saturday. On Saturday a yard waste truck stopped in front of the pile (3 men on the truck) and the workers had a very brief conversation and then drove off. On May 3, after the yard waste truck stopped again and the homeowner actually argued with the two city employees, they picked the pile up. It should also be noted that this is the terrific service that the city now feels we as residents should pay more for. Please send us your comments about the new solid waste fee and will will publish them here with this article. |
| 14 DAYS FOR TRASH SERVICE |
Two years ago this month, Life in Gastonia creator Todd Pierceall began photographing problems in his neighborhood. The photos were of
things he had brought to the attention of the city and nothing seemed to be happening. After contacting the Mayor's office on three separate
occasions and only getting a canned response he felt he needed to act. It was the following month that Life in Gastonia got it's start.
We thought it would be interesting to revisit a couple of the original stories he wrote and see how they turned out. We talked with Todd about
the stories and took some new photographs. Check back next week to read more stories and see new photos. Two are below. |
Two Years Ago
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April 2011
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Two Years Ago
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April 2011
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| In the first two photos above, we see an immense amount of water flowing through a residential yard. In 2009 Joe Bieker, City of Gastonia Stormwater Utility Administrator, met with the home owner and provided a map that showed nine acres of water flowed into one city drain and then into the yard of a neighbor. Because of the topography of the neighbors yard it then funneled all of that water into this yard and then into another drain. Help was promised and to expedite matters the home owner appeared before the stormwater advisory panel which recommended changes to correct the problem. In 2010, city surveyors came out and placed stakes in several yards and surveyed the flow pattern. Since then, nothing has been done and as you can see the problem has been growing worse. The homeowner has spent a lot of money trying to correct the problem himself and is considering legal action against the city. |
| In the second two photos, Joe Bieker was again shown the problem of erosion caused by this city stormwater channel. The erosion was just beginning to show in the first photo taken in 2009 and in the last photo you can see how it has grown progressively worse in 2011. The city has made no attempts to fix the problem. Perhaps Joe is in the wrong profession. Below, we have provided two additional photos that show the storm drain that empties into this channel causing the erosion. The first photo was taken in 2009 and the second one was just this week. Because the drain has not been properly maintained it creates a pool that is full of mosquitoes and other insects and on hot days smells like sewage. This is on the side of a resident's yard. Again, you can plainly see the city has made no attempts to fix the problem even though they have known about it for two years. It seems unAmerica! |
2009
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2011
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| Not all city departments run as inefficiently as Mr. Bieker's, very soon we will be showing some fixes that the city has done. |
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