Mayor Toni Harp reached for a veteran to take over the city’s public works department with a mission to handle more work in-house.
Harp appointed Jeffrey Pescosolido to the $125,000-a-year job. He started the job this week; he has six months to move here from Vernon.
Pesosolido has worked for public works since 1997. His most recent post was chief of operations.
Harp decided not to reappoint the previous director, Doug Arndt, who left the job on Aug. 1.. She said she wanted to take the department “in a new direction,” including doing more work in-house rather than contracting out.
Since August, Chief Administrative Officer Michael Carter doubled as the public works director while the city conducted a search for Arndt’s replacement.
Carter said that a four-person panel — including him, deputy CAO Jennifer Pugh, City Engineer Giovanni Zinn, and Controller Daryl Jones — reviewed the candidates. The group settled on Pescosolido because of “his experience, his knowledge, his understanding of operations, and his interactions with the state and other departments” such as the Livable City Initiative, he said. Click here for a story about changes Pescosolido and others worked on to improve snow-clearance this winter.
The public works department’s 110 staffers are responsible for cleaning and repairing streets, collecting garbage, clearing snow, and maintaining the city fleet.
“We’re going to focus on our basics, revisit our basic services, improve upon those,” Pescosolido said Friday. He said he plans to have the department boost staff training and safety and to save money by doing more repairs in-house.
He also aims to step up “public-space” efforts, working with neighbors to keep garbage in its right places and yards and streets cleaner. The emphasis is on “education” over enforcement (i.e. fines), which he called a last resort.
Pescosolido said he hopes to improve on a “good rapport” the department has developed with contractors working on city rights of ways, as well as with utilities, whose scheduling of their own repairs can end up costing or saving taxpayers plenty of money on subsequent road repairs.