Bloomberg to Brooklyn: GPS Units, Video Cameras will Track Snow Clean-up

Roving video crews and GPS devices installed on 50 Brooklyn snowplows will allow the city to monitor today’s snowplowing efforts better than the disaster a week ago, Mayor Michael Bloomberg said in a City Hall address yesterday afternoon.

 The GPS devices were installed following reports of an intentional slowdown by sanitation workers in response to contract disputes.

 In the address, held at City Hall yesterday, the Mayor acknowledged that there were “problems” with last week’s cleanup.

 But, he said, “We want to ensure all New Yorkers that we are doing everything in our power to make sure we don’t experience those kinds of problems again.

 “We plan to do a great job, the kind of job that the public has come to expect us to do, and you will see that tomorrow,” he said at a news conference at City Hall yesterday afternoon.”

 The mayor said the city has been “a comprehensive review of what went wrong and why” including close looks at the inability of 911 to handle the influx in calls as well following the independent investigation into the alleged slowdowns.

To help the city track cleanup progress this time around, the city installed GPS devices on 50 sanitation trucks in Ditmas Park, Midwood, Flatbush and parts of Kensington, areas he said were hit hardest by last week’s storm.

 The GPS devices will allow City Hall to track the progress of snowplows, and also the units allow sanitation workers to directly communicate with their supervisors if they spot a problem with the touch of a button, Bloomberg said.

 The mayor also said he would use the city’s “Scout Teams,” roaming video units usually used to pinpoint quality of life issues, to send live feed back to City Hall of street conditions.

 “Whether those will be useful or not, I don’t know, but we are going to try it,” he said.

 Bloomberg also noted that the EMS head has been replaced and that “some management and personnel changes” have been made at the Department of Sanitation’s Brooklyn division (although the sanitation changes don’t take effect until Monday).

 “When something goes wrong, we stop everything, we find out why it went wrong – and we fix it,” he said.

Prospect Heights Councilwoman Letitia James, who chairs the council’s Sanitation and Solid Waste Committee, responded to the mayor’s comments by saying that while “technology has its benefits,” we can’t “minimize the fact that” budget cuts, equipment failure, the failure to declare a snow emergency, lack of tow trucks and the “absence of someone in charge” all “may have played a roll of our response to the storm.”

 She added that the demotions among South Brooklyn sanitation supervisors and of the EMS chief “are small measures in the scheme of things and can even be considered scapegoating.”

She is chairing the first of several hearings on what went wrong during the snowstorm on Monday, Jan. 10 at City Hall at 11:00 a.m. The public is invited to attend but will not be able to speak.