NL sidewalk work should raise some questions

At a stone scrapyard on sleepy Mountain Avenue in Westerly are rows and rows of stacked antique granite slabs that are being sold as fine landscaping material.

The handsome granite came from New London city streets, hand-cut stone curbing installed well over 100 years ago and removed this summer, part of an ongoing sidewalk replacement program.

The sight of the city’s treasure trove of stone, being sold off at premium prices, should be troubling to city residents on many fronts.

First of all, the city crafted a sidewalk replacement contract that gave possession of the old granite to the contractor that replaced it.

A yard worker in Westerly told me, when I stopped by this week, that the New London curbing is priced at $40 a linear foot. Michael Slosberg, president of United Builders Supply, which owns the yard, said it generally sells for much less, in the range of $18 to $28 a foot, depending on the condition of the pieces and how much of it someone buys.

Still, it is money that New London will never see.

But the stone sale raises much more troubling issues.

I learned, for instance, that this year’s $1.6 million deal to replace sidewalks on parts of about a dozen city streets, including a long stretch of Connecticut Avenue, was made without competitive bidding.

That’s right, hard as it may be to believe, the city agreed to pay Colonna Concrete & Asphalt Paving of Woodbridge $1.6 million for the sidewalks work this year without getting any other bids.

Saddest of all, it looks to me like unnecessary make-work, a lot of money squandered by the poor city.

I visited the sidewalk replacement work underway on Connecticut Avenue and I have to say the “before” sections, with the old granite curbs and strip of grass between street and sidewalk, look much better than the “after,” new concrete extended all the way to the new machine-cut curbs.

None of the sidewalks scheduled to be expensively replaced there looked the least bit crooked or misplaced. The curbs looked fine, too, just in need of some weeding.

Most important, they preserve the appearance of the 19th century streetscape, a fine old city neighborhood, instead of creating the look of a new shopping center parking lot.

Why would New London, which has a historical City Hall in such disrepair that portions are cordoned off, spend millions of dollars on sidewalks that seem fine, no different really than miles and miles of them in neighborhoods all over the city. The schools superintendent just quit because he says he hasn’t been given the resources needed to educate the city’s kids.

New London is instead paying a fortune to cough up its beautiful old stone to be sold off for landscaping on driveways, terraces and gardens of rich people all over New England.

I spoke to interim Public Works Director Brian Sear (appointed in 2015, he is still listed on the city’s website as interim, apparently because he is one of the city department heads in violation of a charter requirement that they live in the city), who explained why he organized the no-bid work with Colonna.

The company was originally the low bidder for a contract in 2014 and the city has continued using it ever since on new projects, as long as it keeps the same price categories ($44 a foot, for instance, to replace curbing,) Sear said.

The company does a good job and is easy to work with, he added.

Sear, a former first selectman of Canterbury and state House representative who had no prior experience in managing a city public works department before New London, clearly does not understand the principles of competitive bidding when you are spending public money. Neither does the City Council.

You shouldn’t just anoint a contractor and keep using them year after year on new projects — Colonna got no-bid street work in 2015, 2016 and this year — without checking the market by asking for bids.

Even if the price seems great, it looks corrupt. There’s no way of knowing you’re not steering all that money to a friend, business associate or relative unless you can prove you offered the work up to anyone willing to bid.

Sear told me he had no idea the granite curbs were being resold. He said he thought they were being ground up and used for bedding material.

Contractor John Colonna told me he was only paid $5 a foot for the curbing, barely enough, he said, to cover the cost of removal.

Slosberg of UBS told me selling scrap stone is a big part of the company’s business, but he said the markup is not as profitable as it may seem because of the costs involved in moving and warehousing and marketing the heavy stone.

In addition to buying stone from contractors, they also sometimes buy directly from municipalities. Last year, they bought 53 trailer loads from the city of Providence, after successfully bidding to buy the stone.

Apparently, in Providence, run by professionals, they knew what they had and how to profit from it.