Village Budget Session Spotlights DPW

The third village budget session focused on Garden City's Department of Public Works (DPW).

Through its building budget, DPW maintains nearly all village buildings, except for Saint Paul's and the Recreation building. Director Robert Mangan said the building budget decreased 3.9 percent over last year's due to an employee cashing out on personal time, which dropped the regular salary line from $200,000 to $179,000.

Several hiccups have delayed the elevator installation at Garden City Village Hall but Mangan assured the project is close to completion.

"The elevator is in. It's operating," he said. "They're closing in. They started brickwork and they're waiting to install the windows and do the penetrations on the roof."

With a favorable weather forecast, penetrations were expected this weekend.

"They have to penetrate the roof over the court and the executive conference room to provide the air conditioning ducts in those offices," Mangan said. "It's moving along. I say within the next two months we should get them out of here."

The department's Central Garage budget increased 5.14 percent over last year's due to required maintenance work.

"A lot of the bricks over the bays need some outside work, and additional maintenance work needs to be done with some of the lifts in the garage," Mangan said. "Other than that we tried to keep this pretty tight."

The budget includes two supervisors, eight auto mechanics and one part-time mechanic, who all maintain 100 pieces of equipment. Mangan said one mechanic left on medical retirement, which created a vacant position.

Uniform cleaning services, at $800 per employee, are also included in this budget and sparked conversation amongst the trustees.

Trustee Dennis Donnelly questioned the hefty laundering fee: "I'll tell you what, for the $8,000 have them send their uniforms to my house."

He also asked Mangan if the department has looked into installing solar panels on the garage roof to bring down electricity costs associated with that building.

"Not yet," he said. "We put in an application for the roof at the Water Department as a starting point. We'll try that first."

The roof Mangan is speaking of is on the building to the right of the historic Water Works building off Eleventh Street. He is hoping to get the project 100 percent funded; it costs approximately half a million to complete, according to Mangan.

"We looked at other places for solar panels, like the Clinton Road site, but the electric demand is very great with the pumps and the stripping tower," he said.

Street maintenance, the largest of the Street Department's budgets, includes four supervisors, three motor equipment operators, two weekday watchmen and a part-time weekend watchman. There are also 24 vehicles assigned to this budget.

"A comment was made a while back that the street sweepers weren't out as often as they could've been," Trustee Laurence Quinn said.

Mangan said the department is hoping to lease a new street sweeper for $38,500 per year for five years with the option to then purchase it for $1. In addition to sweeping all village roads and parking fields, the department provides sweeper service to the school district during vacation weeks like February break and just before the start of school in September.

"It's not that often but we provide them with that service," Mangan said.

The department renders other services to the school district as well, including the opportunity to buy off of the department's tree and sidewalk contracts and use of its gas pumps to fill up school-owned vehicles.

"We share the gas pumps," Mangan said. "They use our gas pumps and it's billed out to them."

Contractual salary adjustments increased 2.9 percent. "This last storm, we had $35,000 in overtime," Mangan noted. The Feb. 10 snowstorm resulted in approximately $30,000 worth of overtime.

Mangan said his department could bring in a second shift from the Sanitation Department to plow the streets and haul snow from critical parking fields.

"I want to congratulate your department on a job well done," Trustee Donnelly said of February's snow cleanup.

Mangan said the department received very few complaints about snow clearing during the last storm. "We broke in the new deputy supervisor at the Village Yard," he said. "It was a baptism by fire."

Mayor Robert Rothschild said the village did receive complaints from residences on county-owned roads, including Nassau Boulevard, Rockaway Avenue and Cathedral Avenue.

"It seems like they do their first pass and never come back," he said.

Trustee Donnelly suggested the village clear those roads and bill the county for services rendered, to which the mayor replied, "Let's look into it."

Two employees are assigned to the street light/traffic control crew, the busiest crew the department has, according to Mangan.

"We try to supplement them during the summer, especially during street painting," he said.

Oftentimes overtime is allocated because these crews mainly work on Sundays to paint lines in the parking fields.

The Parks Department budget was slightly modified; Mangan said the increase dropped from 2.3 percent to 1 percent.

This department includes 22.75 positions.

"We used to have six seasonal employees. This year we're only putting in for two seasonal workers, a general supervisor and the assistant supervisor, who is new this year," he said.

The village is broken up into four districts; each section has a truck with a crew and a labor supervisor who handles the maintenance of each area.

"We also have the nursery manager … He handles all of plantings on Franklin Avenue, Seventh Street, New Hyde Park Road," Mangan said. "We also have a [two-man] hedge crew. We have a lot of hedges that the village owns. That hedge crew is busy from early spring right up to the winter."

Mangan further noted that the department's salary line decreased from $1,291,000 to $1,269,031.

The sanitary sewers department saw a 17.95 percent hike, with contractual services accounting for the large increase. "We have a couple of sewer mains that have breaks in them maybe nine or ten feet down, a little too much for our guys to handle," Frank Koch,  superintendent of water and sewer, said.

Koch said six sewer mains in the village need to be addressed. "Right now we're looking at Euston Road, between North Avenue and Stewart Avenue," he said.

The refuse and garbage budget decreased due to lower disposal fees under the new Covanta contract, which began in August when the village's contract with the Town of Hempstead expired, and the shade tree budget decreased by 7.42 percent ($85,000).