Raccoon Moved, Twice

The New Haven raccoon didn’t make it past the middle of the road. Until someone moved his carcass. Then someone else moved it back.

The raccoon’s fate became an exhibit of how government can work better to keep streets safe for travel.

His story unfolded first on the SeeClickFix problem-solving web platform, then on the latest episode of WNHH’s ​“SeeClickFix Radio,” during an interview with Erik Filkorn of the Vermoent Agency of Transportation.

That’s right, Vermont — because the raccoon’s saga unfolded on Route 17 in New Haven … Vermont.

“There is a large dead raccoon in the middle of the road,” Ann Watson of New Haven, Vermont, wrote in this posting Monday. ​“It is going to be a mess if people run over it. It is right in front of my house.

The message was routed to Vermont’s transportation agency, which works with SeeClickFix, the New Haven (Connecticut)-based company. Filkorn works as the agency’s outreach manager. He explained that the agency set up its account to bypass him, and thus get quicker results, in cases like this: Watson’s complaint went directly to an agency manager in her district, who routed it that same day to the area’s maintenance supervisor.

Meanwhile, Watson moved the raccoon out of the road. For some reason, it later reappeared in the middle of the road. By day’s end, though, the government cleared the raccoon away.

Filkhorn said he doesn’t know how the raccoon got back in the middle of the road. ​“Maybe the crows thought it would cook better” there, he theorized.

He does know that his agency can get to only a fraction of dead animals in roads throughout its heavily wooded rural state. It needs to prioritize instances where the dead animals threaten public safety, like this one. SeeClickFix is enabling citizens to help his agency find and respond to such cases.

Click on or download the above audio file to hear the full ​“SeeClickFix Radio” interview with Filkorn, which touched on why Vermont’s 48-year-old ban on highway advertising billboards (“Early on Vermont figured out that it’s brand was beauty, and signs were not helpful”), the challenges of wording highways information signs effectively, the similarities between pothole-filling and whack-a-mole, the development of ​“Green Up Day,” how to juggle baguette-baking with government-to-citizen communications, and why a ​“gore” is l“like a hanging chad of a town.”

This episode of WNHH’s ​“SeeClickFix Radio” was made possible in part thanks to support from Yale-New Haven Hospital.