PLOWED UNDERBoston Globe Editorial, February 8, 2005 THE POLITICAL history of Snow Belt states includes elected and appointed officials who lost their jobs because they failed to get streets or sidewalks cleared in a timely way. Katherine Abbott, commissioner of the state Department of Conservation and Recreation, joined that roster last Friday. Governor Romney fired her for not having cleared all the sidewalks on a DCR parkway near West Roxbury High School, the site of an accident in which a truck hit and injured students walking in the road.The governor was well within his rights to hold Abbott accountable. But the incident drew attention mainly to the inability of both state and local governments to handle the occasional monster snowstorm that paralyzes the state. That will continue to be a problem until the governor, the Legislature, and the state's municipalities agree to fund snow removal of both streets and sidewalks at a higher level. Abbott's agency is in the snowplowing business because DCR is an amalgam of both the former Department of Environmental Management and the former Metropolitan District Commission, with its urban parks, beaches, rinks, and parkway roads. Abbott's supporters say that the DCR lacked the plows it needed and had to do much of its poststorm cleanup work on a "squeaky wheel" basis. Spokesmen for the administration said that she had the resources she needed if she had prioritized better. The DCR might have handled the 30 inches of snow better if Abbott's restructuring of its old DEM and MDC elements, scheduled for completion in the spring, had been in place. It is regrettable that she will not be around to finish that task, because she brought a vision of the importance of parks in people's lives, plus an ability to negotiate the public-private partnerships for park support that chronic underfunding of her department increasingly makes necessary. |