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Last week, Mount Vernon Mayor Richard Thomas announced that eight of the DPW’s 17 sanitation trucks are currently out of commission, and the city owes $257,066 to 13 parts vendors. Some of the unpaid bills allegedly date back to last April. Two of Mount Vernon’s five street sweepers are also out of commission.
On Wednesday, March 6, the dearth of trucks forced officials to cancel recycling pickup, and threatened collection for the rest of the week.
“Garbage collection on the south side of the city will resume on Thursday as public officials work to get some of the grounded garbage trucks back on the road,” city officials announced. “Residents should return their recycling to their storage areas until next week’s collection.”
While garbage collection has resumed, officials are warning that things may be slow due to the grounding of the bulk of the fleet.
Thomas said that deferred maintenance due to the unpaid bills was partly responsible for the safety inspection failure and accident. Thomas called yesterday’s accident a wake-up call. According to Ederer, Thomas has “convinced some of the vendors to extend emergency credit to get some of the grounded trucks rolling.”
“These trucks that we have are in dire need of replacement and repairs,” Thomas said. “We spent the past 24 hours talking with the vendors, reaching out to them, asking them to please help us help Mount Vernon. Today we saw a consequence of the fact that these trucks are not safe enough to go on the roads and that we didn’t have the parts to make the repairs.”
“We are going to collect garbage tomorrow,” Mount Vernon Public Works Commissioner Mark Ederer said. “It may be a little slow because we’ll only have four trucks.”
The “enhanced inspections” of Mount Vernon’s garbage trucks came a day after a malfunctioning vehicle slammed into a car and damaged a home on Elm Avenue on Tuesday, March 5.
Thomas once again placed the onus for this weeks debacle on Mount Vernon Comptroller Deborah Reynolds, who he alleges failed to pay $257,000 in outstanding bills to more than a dozen vendors.
“Due to Comptroller Deborah Reynolds’ refusal to pay the city’s bills, vendors who supply the Department of Public Works with crucial parts that are necessary to keep Mount Vernon’s aging fleet operational have cut the city off,” he said. “Without these parts and supplies, DPW mechanics cannot perform critical repairs, which means when trucks go down, they stay down.
“This is a crisis for the public to voice their concern to a higher power,” he said. “We need the help of the governor (and) the state comptroller, who is inside City Hall doing an audit on the Comptroller’s office. This has been a long time coming.”
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