Public Works #2
Heading Up the Road

Friday is the last day on the job for New Haven’s deputy director of public works, who is credited with new repaving techniques, snow removal improvements and other efficiencies that have upgraded the department.

Next stop for Howard Weissberg, who has been with the Department of Public Works (DPW) for two and a half years, is Meriden, where he has taken the post of associate city engineer.

Weissberg, a civil engineer by training, said few opportunities would have lured him away from New Haven, but this is one. He has two young children with whom he wants to spend more time. And the commute from his home in Middlefield will now be only eight minutes.

“My wife has big plans for me,” he said.

His boss, John Prokop, also said that he plans to retire next year.

Weissberg’s wife is a dentist with an established practice in Middlefield, so staying in New Haven permanently as a possible successor to Prokop was probably not in the cards.

Before Prokop, DPW was an orphaned department. City Engineer Dick Miller had been doing double duty to lead it; then parks chief Bob Levine did the same. Reputation and morale were low. There was a plan afoot to merge it with the parks department.

In 2007, the mayor hired Prokop, a former city cop, head of security for Southern and most recently head of security for the housing authority, to be the ​“problem solver” to take over DPW.

A municipal waste authority, new trash pick-up policies and new toters were already in the works. Prokop oversaw their implementation. He also brought a no-nonsense way of dealing with staff and other common sense improvements. Click here for a story on some of those, which included a policy for assigning the newest piece of equipment to drive or use not to the guy with most seniority but best safety record.

He also decided to hire a civil engineer as the deputy director. That person turned out to be Howard Weissberg. The decision was in part due to City Engineer Dick Miller having sat in Prokop’s shoes.

Having its own civil engineering expertise ​“lends credibility to public works,” said Prokop, although he was at pains to point out that Miller continues to set the standards for city work and to mange the larger projects.

Prokop said he has saved the city at least $5 million over the past five years through these personnel and management changes, along with Weissberg’s technical improvements in doing a road inventory, the use of new paving and ice-melting materials, and computer tracking.

“He [Howard] has taken us to the next professional level. He set standards for tracking [the efficiencies of paving contracts, trash routes, etc.]. Before we were driven not by data but by calls for service,” Prokop said.

“Dick’s [engineering] staff can focus on large-scale projects. We’ll do small-scale sidewalk work,” he said.

Grinding & Hot In Place Recycling

Those small projects add up. Grinding down what Weissberg called ​“trip hazards” on city sidewalks is one of them.

With money short, he said, the administration’s goal was to promote safety while reducing liability . From where Weissberg sits supervising sidewalk repair, that meant bringing in what he termed a ​“giant horizontal wet saw” and grinding down the sidewalk wherever the sidewalk lifts up more than a half inch.

“We’ve eliminated a thousand” such saws, Weissberg said.

Weissberg also has supervised his own crews doing at last 20 road repavings; that’s in addition to the deputy director supervising separate contracts of outside pavers, crack-sealers, and others on the larger jobs.

When Prokop began his tenure, the department had 130 staff. Now it has 117 — doing more work, he said.

In an interview on his penultimate day on the job, Weissberg wore a sparkling white shirt. That didn’t keep him from taking a reporter out to busy Middletown Avenue at rush hour right in front of DPW headquarters to demonstrate some of the road work he’s done.

Middletown Avenue had been a bumpy mess for many years. Early in his tenure, Weissberg undertook a full pavement inventory of the 228 miles of the city’s roads. That hadn’t been done in a decade, Weissberg said.

With funds short and demands long, the strategy was to maximize longevity of the roads and reduce overall costs. That’s where the inventory came in. Based on the findings, priorities and usage, some roads would be repaved in their entirety, some crack-sealed, others treated and preserved using inventive new approaches.

Roads such as Middletown Avenue. Here he used ​“hot-in place-recycling.” Instead of bringing in tons of asphalt from the outside, the top inch or so of the road is ground up, mixed with other materials and reused in place. Savings? Weissberg estimated $30 to $40,000.

Saltonstall Avenue was repaved in the same manner. Weissberg said it was the first time New Haven used the technique.

Had he stayed in New Haven, he said, he would have liked to have tried ​“hot-in place-recycling” on a whole neighborhood. And to do for concrete — that is, the 340 miles of New Haven sidewalks — what he has undertaken for streets.

Other facets of the work Weissberg reflected on with satisfaction include integrating SeeClickFix into DPW’s own computer system to find and to track problems; online permitting for pavement and other work that reduces past issues, like a utility tearing up a road that has recently been repaved.

Then of course, there was snow to clear. Tons and tons of it this winter. Click here to read a story about Weissberg patrolling in his plow-fitted SUV instructing citizens not to push the cleared snow in the right of way.

Click here for another story on how Weissberg brought in a giant snow-melting machine when storage of snow at the DPW yard during the multiple storms of winter 2010-11.

And here for how he use magnesium chloride to pre-treat roads before the storm, so that when the snow hit, it would melt faster.

“We’ve saved a ton of money and time. We’ve had ice storms without accidents; that’s phenomenal.”

He said the staff has now bought into all these reforms.

Weissberg conceded that bulk pick-up backlogs and misunderstandings of that procedure remain problems to be worked on.

“We do an awful lot of bulk pick-up and trash pick-up. If we get three or four calls [of complaint] and we pick up 5,000 cans, I’m OK with that.”

Longtime staffer Donna Ferruci, the citizen response administrator at DPW, said of Weissberg: ​“Howard likes to see things move. Things don’t happen fast enough for him. Technically he’s been a great help.”

As for his own plans, Prokop said he’s bought a house in Florida where his 88-year old dad lives; the latter is putting pressure on him to buy a bass-fishing boat. Prokop has not given in. Yet.