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New-Vegetable-1274 t1_iwm8quq wrote

Reply to comment by emptygroove in That should take care of it for the winter…. by RustyJeans

Worcester once had a large DPW and a fleet of trucks. They did an excellent job of plowing and snow removal. Sometime in the 1970s the city decided to privatize all of that. Anyone with a pickup truck with a plow became a contractor. These guys had areas they were responsible for and were on call. Once the call was made they were on the clock even if it hadn't started snowing. There was a threshold at which point they had to go to work. Say it was six inches, nothing got touched until it reached that. So while the clock was running, these guys picked up private jobs while they waited for the snow to hit the threshold. The city determined when the threshold was met or not and the clock stopped or kept going. I don't have to tell you that Joe pickup truck was raking it in all winter on the taxpayers dime. Worst yet, this began a long history of shitty roads in Worcester. The plowing went from excellent to maybe a single pass if you were lucky. A lot of these guys went to a bar once they got the call and got fortified for what may be a long night and some of them ended up playing bumper cars. I don't know what Worcester does now. I don't think the tax base would allow a bigger DPW.

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WorcesterMom t1_iwo73xb wrote

They brought back the busses and it’s going pretty well, let’s bring back the plows too!

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New-Vegetable-1274 t1_iwrg9sv wrote

The Worcester I grew up in, 50s-60s was a prosperous industrial city. When I was in third grade our geography textbook (they taught geography back then) had a picture of Worcester. The caption said Worcester Massachusetts the industrial capital of the world. At the time there was more industry here per square mile than any other place on the planet. As a kid I thought that was a pretty big deal, it was. There were many thousands of jobs and so a very high tax base. There were many factories that employed 300+ employees, some much larger. I worked in one that would take twenty minutes to walk from one end to the other. with that kind of revenue the city employed hundreds of people and stuff got done. When industry left, Worcester all but died. From what I read here on reddit it's on the mend. I don't live there now but still would love to see Worcester prosper again.

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