NORWALK, Conn. So you think things are quiet in Norwalk? There's not much going on in the mayor's race? No back and forth between Democrats and Republicans?
Take a look on the Internet.
"I try to ignore your caustic emails, but enough is enough, your knowledge of the facts are usually minimal at best or in this case nonexistent," Mayor Richard Moccia wrote to Common Councilwoman Nora King on Wednesday.
"I am not being caustic Dick, but honest and direct," King wrote back. "...The problem is Smith Street!!! You are the 'mayor' of the sixth largest city in CT. You should be able to make a decision regarding one simple street."
Norwalk Center, a Google Group, has been creating a stir in City Hall. The group discussion list for Norwalk Center residents, businesses, property owners and merchants has 90 members. It was created in March to give the group, which has been meeting for years, a way to communicate, according to member Jackie Lightfield. Things had been fairly quiet but activity blossomed in late July.
First there were weeds to pull. Then tires went tumbling down the embankment from Mill Hill onto the long-neglected and closed Smith Street.
In August, things got more heated, with a bluestone curb issue competing with the tires for the forefront of debate. Department of Public Works Director Hal Alvord said he and Moccia have gotten hundreds of emails regarding the tires and the bluestones. The deluge began when Norwalk Center member Peter Schuerch broadcast his bluestone concerns to the group. He said the emails are now independent of the group and plentiful. Moccia and Alvord were frustrated Thursday at the pressure put on them.
About 200 tires were dumped onto Smith Street from 5 to 6 a.m. July 29 from the parking lot of the Norwalk Historic Society. An FGB construction worker was on the street, handling dirt pulled during the Lockwood Lane drainage project. (The dirt is being stored on Smith Street, as the state Department of Energy and Environmental Protection requires it be checked for contaminants before disposal.) The worker saw the tires cascading down Mill Hill and ran to get the license plate of the truck. But the operator saw him and sped away.
A Norwalk police report was filed within three hours, and Larry Losio, the city's ordinance enforcement officer, got involved. "I visited and inspected the site, took photos and concluded the best way to uncover evidence was to meticulously go through the tires while simultaneously removing them from the site," he said in an email. "I decided that I would call David Shockley and Denisse Guzman from Hope Works in the afternoon to arrange for a coordinated cleanup and search for evidence."
Lightfield found the tires the next day, a Saturday, and emailed the city's customer service department, copying Moccia, Alvord and others. She got no answer, which she said is unreasonable in this era of Blackberries and the like. On Sunday, July 31, she filed a second police report and in a post titled "Amazing Amateur Detective Work," she informed Norwalk Center via Google. Lightfield presented a photo of a tire, with a tag she found, as evidence. "Just like I predicted, here's a tire pulled from the stack of illegally dumped tires with tech name and vehicle owner info affixed," she wrote.
Moccia and Alvord say Lightfield "broke the chain of evidence." Alvord thinks that, by broadcasting it on the Internet, she potentially alerted the guilty parties.
"If the city was concerned about chain of evidence they would have secured the scene in the first place and they would have responded to my emails about the tires immediately," Lightfield said in an email. "They didn't. I took pictures anyway, and called the police after no response from them."
The following Tuesday, Aug, 2, Losio got Hope Works to the scene. They went through the tires one by one, looking for evidence. They used a pickup truck to go back and forth to the transfer station. At 3 p.m. when the station closed, they had removed about 100 tires.
On Aug, 10, King wrote: "It definitely appears that the City of Norwalk isn't stepping up to the plate to deal with this. It is very clear that our Public Works Department and the Police Department should be on top of this, but for some reason the leadership at the helm of our city doesn't want to hold them accountable." Police Chief Harry Rilling called that "an unfair assessment as to the facts."
Group member Michael Ward wrote to Moccia on Wednesday to complain that the tires were still there, 12 days after the city discovered them.
"This is not TV where CSI solves a crime in less than hour," Moccia wrote back.
Losio said Thursday he had put about 30 hours into the investigation. Alvord said the investigation was laborious. "Unfortunately, the Social Security number of the person who dumped those tires was not on that tag," he said. "The name and address of the person who dumped those tires was not on that tag. What that tag gave us was a starting point of potentially being able to track this tire." But "Larry found out the car's owner, the dealership, the company that picks up the tires, the last time they were picked up."
All of which was in New York and Long Island. New York has different laws than Connecticut and tracks tire movers differently.
Moccia said Thursday that Losio had been going through the remaining tires, looking for evidence. "There's a lot of different moving parts here and that's the difficulty," Moccia said. "You have tires from all over." He said Losio had finished looking through the tires and he hoped they would be removed Friday.
Alvord said Friday afternoon that Hope Works employees finished at about 2:15 p.m.
At 3:17 p.m., Democratic candidate for mayor Andy Garfunkel issued a statement, saying that at 11 a.m. Saturday he would hold a news conference. He included the statement he would make, as he stood in front of the pile of tires. "How many more days - how many more days will it take for the mayor to issue the order to clean this up?" he wrote. "It was on Sunday July 31st, 13 days ago, when it was discovered by a Norwalk resident that someone dumped these tires here along one of Norwalk's Historic Streets, Smith Street which as you can see is along the Norwalk River. Today, like the past 12 days, Public Works crews are not available to clean up this debris and what some feel is an environmental hazard."
Michael Ward announced the disappearance of the tires on Norwalk Center at 5:26 p.m. "Mystically, the tire elves arrived at some point in the last 24 hours and removed them all," he wrote. "Thank you, tire elves."
Tod Bryant replied at 5:52 p.m. "Funny," he wrote. "Just as Andy was going to have a press conference there..."
Evonne Klein sent another email to the press three minutes later, announcing the news conference.
Garfunkel's statement continues: "This situation that exists here on Smith Street is representative of the mayor's six years of failed leadership to be the champion of our children's education; his lack of vision to develop Norwalk to be the premier City in the State of Connecticut we all know it can be look around, we are in the heart of our downtown and this public space has become literally a dumping ground; and sadly this situation represents the mayor's inability to respond to the concerns of the community he serves."
Late Friday evening, Klein canceled the news conference.
"We took away the tires in the first couple of days, about a 100 of them," Moccia replied in a phone call to The Daily Norwalk. "Larry and the police were going through them, now they took them away. They want to make a Tiregate out of something like this, as if it's a lack of leadership, here's my answer: the taxpayers are paying Mr. Garfunkel to be a town clerk and occasionally maybe he should show up in the office of town clerk."
Garfunkel said Friday he is in the office Tuesdays and Thursdays at this time, as his campaign gears up. Thomas Hamilton, the city's finance director, said Garfunkel's salary is $81,120. Moccia makes $99,616.92.
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