City councilors must have felt as though they were playing catch-up this week. Trouble is, this was no game and it was no fun.
During the council's weekly meeting on Tuesday night, members found themselves asking more than once, "Why didn't we know this before now?" or "Why didn't anyone do something sooner?"
Cases in point:
Councilors were told that a 2-year-old problem with alarms in the Ward Hill Industrial Park have been fixed, sort of.
They learned that they approved a budget last month that left no one in charge of maintenance and security at Haverhill Stadium.
They had to appease a confused business community who learned just last week — as did the council — that their municipal trash pickup was scheduled to end in September, even though it had been budgeted through next June.
Their frustration was palpable, and ought to extend to every taxpayer, downtown business customer and resident in the city.
Taken individually, each incidence highlights a lack of planning and communication among city boards, officials and departments.
But taken as a whole, they indicate a troubling pattern of managing by reaction — or simple inaction — rather than active leadership.
The most troubling is the city's lackluster response to complaints by Ward Hill tenants who reported that emergency alarms often did not work. Councilor Dave Hall said his request for information showed at least 40 complaints registered from the industrial park with no response by the fire chief.
After the spotty fire alarm performance came to light earlier this month, the city hired a company to make short-term repairs, Mayor James Fiorentini told the council, discovering money to pay for the fixes in an unused account from 2007.
Council President Michael Hart was not impressed. "I don't think public safety matters should be handled by catastrophe, or near catastrophe," he told the mayor.
We hope the city soon will be able to rectify a situation that had the potential to allow a costly catastrophe. While workers replace a grass field with synthetic turf inside Haverhill Stadium, the city discovered that stadium caretaker Dante Gobbi had lost his job in June's round of school department cuts.
The turf project is worth more than $1 million.
Councilors have every right to be miffed that no one mentioned during a June budget review that the line item for the stadium superintendent had been eliminated.
The stadium has been the recipient of roughly $3 million in upgrades in recent years. It is a centerpiece of the community, the city high school's home athletic field and the site of many of our holiday celebrations.
Traditionally, the school department funds the caretaker's position. When it found itself unable to do so this year, more of an effort at communicating the need should have taken place.
Interim Superintendent James Scully told councilors he would take steps to return Gobbi to his position. School Committee members and the mayor, who is a member of the school board, must make sure it happens.
And finally, changes to the city's trash rules, which include reducing the number of trash barrels a resident may put out and eliminating commercial and industrial trash pickup for roughly 200 downtown businesses, came as a surprise to the business owners and the City Council.
The timing of the change, made by the Board of Health, was atrocious, coming just a week after the single-stream curbside recycling program expanded to encompass all trash routes in the city.
City Councilor Bill Ryan jumped to the conclusion that the recycling program was to blame and accused the mayor and its supporters of "sticking it" to the business community because the program was too costly.
He was wrong in his reasoning, but at least he brought to light the lack of discussion with which the change was made.
Councilors were right to agree to allow business owners to sound off on the new rules, but were also right to stand firm in support of single-stream recycling.
In the end, the council was able to air out and sort out the various faux pas that occurred over the past several weeks.
We commend councilors for bringing the issues to light and are encouraged by their commitment to being the public's eyes and ears.
