At first, Martin Daniels let it go. Hey, streetlights die all the time. But after a few days, with the light on East 96th Street still out, he could no longer help himself. On Jan. 22, 2007, he called 311.
So it began, smoothly enough, as one of the 50,000 or so daily complaints to New York’s call center for nonemergencies. After all, how many months does it take to change a light bulb?
As it turned out, a year and a day.
There are 330,000 street lights in the naked city; this is the story of only one of them. Pieced together through work orders provided by the Transportation Department and Mr. Daniels’s own meticulous notes, it shows how miscommunication, unresponsive officials, corroded equipment and a change in contractors combined to turn what is normally a two- or three-day job into a 52-week adventure.
But the story also illustrates the hair-pulling frustrations ordinary citizens often experience in getting potholes filled or obnoxious noises silenced and even, to a degree, what the mayor faces in trying to improve New York’s quality of life, or light.
It almost certainly made a difference in the outcome that Mr. Daniels is one of those quintessential New York characters: a confessed nudnik. Dozens of times a year, he telephones city officials about local irritants, from the lack of sidewalk curb cuts to accommodate wheelchairs to a mound of asphalt left on a sidewalk after a repaving job.
“I may be a pain, but I want these things done,” Mr. Daniels said, noting that his wife, a nurse, had to navigate the darkened street when she left work at Mount Sinai Hospital. “If you walk on the street, you want to be safe.”
The street light in front of 65 East 96th Street, on the north side of the street, east of Madison Avenue, became a particular passion for Mr. Daniels, a 66-year-old semiretired computer programming analyst who lived around the corner. So much so that he kept a diary documenting every call, explanation and excuse. It grew to four pages; excerpts read like a study in despair.
He called Con Ed. “Phone message said 20-minute wait — I hung up,” one entry reads. He called the office of City Councilwoman Melissa Mark-Viverito and was referred to Community Board 11. “Already did — matter unresolved,” he noted with apparent dismay. “Also, told her how 311 does not work. Always say fixed when not fixed and treat it as a new complaint.”
He called the councilwoman’s office back and asked for an aide: “Put on hold for 20 minutes. Then was told to call back. I gave my name and number and said ‘call me back.’ She did not.”
Mr. Daniels even enlisted his wife, Christina. On Jan. 9, 2008, he wrote, “Con Ed truck working at base of light. Christina spoke with repairman. He said some lights out since 2001. Depends upon how active community complains.”
The complaints began almost a year earlier, at 10:01 p.m. on Jan. 22, 2007, when Mr. Daniels called 311 to report two defective streetlights — one of the nearly 100,000 such calls 311 receives each year.
Ordinarily, officials said, once the city is notified by a call to 311, the routine time for the city’s contractor to repair a defective street light is two days — down from 19 days three years ago. Even if the repair is more complicated and requires Con Ed’s intervention, the average repair time last year was under 13 days, compared with nearly 84 days as recently as 2005.
This repair job started routinely enough. The Department of Transportation was notified immediately. But then things began to go awry, Mr. Daniels’s diary and the department’s work logs show.
According to Mr. Daniels’s account, he called again on Feb. 2 and was told to resubmit his two complaints. By Feb. 12, three weeks after the first call to 311, the light at 96th Street and Lexington Avenue had been repaired. But not the one in front of 65 East 96th.
On Feb. 13, after a complaint from another resident had been logged at 311, Mr. Daniels was told that the streetlight had been fixed. It hadn’t been. When he called again on March 1, he was told no complaint was pending, so he submitted one again.
On March 12, the pole was removed.. A new pole (cost: $1,320) was installed a month later, by April 14, but the light still wasn’t working. Mr. Daniels informed 311 on April 17 and then began calling Con Ed directly.
He also turned to the community board and his councilwoman, to no avail. Finally, on Aug. 23, he phoned in another complaint to the city. He was told later that one was already pending; it turned out to be his call from April.
On Sept. 18, he reached a human being at Con Ed, who promised the light would be fixed within a week. It wasn’t. He said he called Con Ed again on Oct. 16 and someone said the light would be inspected within 48 hours and fixed within a week.
Finally, on Oct. 25, he called the office of the public advocate, Betsy Gotbaum, which contacted the Department of Transportation’s chief of street lighting.
The version of city officials, while not poles apart from Mr. Daniels’s, describes complications that undoubtedly slowed the repair work.
They said the pole lost power and blamed the problem on a “deteriorating conduit” from the Con Ed feeder cable, which meant that the foundation of the light had to be rebuilt and the pole replaced.
In the meantime, the city changed streetlight-repair contractors, so the inspection and repair process had to start over, delaying things for months. Con Ed had to get permits to dig a trench from its manhole to the lamppost.
“Our electrical engineers went to the location, inspected the street light and found a condition that required Con Ed to remove the electrical cable so that we could remove the light pole and work on the foundation,” said Ted Timbers, a city spokesman.
“We notified Con Ed. Once Con Ed had completed their work, we went back to the location, removed the light pole, reworked the foundation, removed an obstruction and replaced the light pole. We then notified Con Ed that they could reinstall the electrical cable,” Mr. Timbers said.
The city says the repairs were completed on Sept. 26. But sometime after that (Mr. Daniels’s calls resumed on Oct. 16), the light went out. Con Ed was summoned again by the city on Jan. 7, 2008. Everyone agrees it was finally fixed on Jan. 23, 2008 — a year and a day after the first complaint.
“You get frustrated, but I’m a persistent kind of person,” Mr. Daniels said. “I just don’t give up.” When would the light have been fixed without his noodging? “Maybe never,” he replied. A spokesman for Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, who initiated the 311 system, which now handles an average of 68,000 calls a day, deferred to the Transportation Department for comment.
“Most streetlights are repaired within three days of being reported to 311,” said Seth Solomonow, a spokesman for the department. “And while we work hard to keep each of the city’s 333,000 streetlights lit, a lifetime on the street can take its toll, requiring more than just a replacement bulb to fix.”
Mr. Daniels doesn’t take the delay personally. He said the neighborhood, on what has been considered the customary border between the Upper East Side and East Harlem, gets short shrift: “To tell you the truth, it’s north of 96th Street. That’s the end of the story. We’re at the very beginning of East Harlem and with rats running around; they don’t care if there’s a light out.”
After his wife retired late in 2007, the couple moved south — a dozen blocks — from Park Avenue north of 96th Street to a neighborhood where, he is convinced, public officials are more responsive to citizen complaints.
“I’m not going to give up calling,” he said, “but the number of phone calls will be down.”
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