Lost in the Cracks

For over a decade, Wayne Murphy has been waiting and waiting and waiting for something to be done about the cracked and potholed street in front of Benjamin Franklin Elementary School in Kensington. One day last March, a crew showed up across the street from the elementary school. They scraped and repaved the street for a few hours. Murphy was estatic. He would be the champion of his neighborhood. He couldn't wait to see the finished repairs.

A few hours later, the crews left and Murphy went to see the work they had done. A few neighbors assembled in the middle of the street. They didn't like what they saw -- fault-like cracks from sidewalk to sidewalk and chunks of asphalt still missing from the street. The job seemed half finished.

Murphy wasted no time. He went to his computer and found numbers for the various city departments in charge of street maintenance. A supervisor at the street-repair division responded, but he told Murphy that his office was not handling that project and he would need to call someone else. Murphy was back on bumpy ground.

Next up, Councilwoman Toni Atkins office. After no response to his first email, he sent another. By this time, over a month had elapsed since the crew had come out. Finally, council representative April Chesebro responded. She had sent a request to the street division and hadn't heard anything back.

That was three months ago, and still nothing has happened. No one has called back. No one has written him. But Murphy is not defeated. At the Kensington-Talmadge Planners meeting on July 9, he stood in front of the crowded room at the Normal Heights Community Center and told his fellow residents that he will not give up. "Now that I'm retired, I have ample time to see this through."

The city's street-repair division had no record of any work done in March and the field engineering department could not find any previous projects at that location. Unfortunately for Murphy, a decade to get his street in order just isn't long enough.

The Kensington/Talmadge Planners meet on the second Wednesday of every month. A link to the Kensington/Talmadge planners can be found at 411kensington.com.