Well. Here we are again. Another week, another road closure announced approximately five minutes before they put the barrels out — and this time it is Gilbert Drive, between Yakima Avenue and Barge Street, closed starting April 20th through the 27th for drainage work and roadway repairs. Now, I want to be clear: drainage work is important. I am not against drainage. What I am against — and I have been against it for several weeks now, as regular readers will recall — is the way this city treats road closure announcements like a surprise party that only the road crew was invited to. You do not find out about it in advance. You find out about it when you are already on Gilbert Drive with nowhere to go and a truck full of groceries and somewhere to be.
I have been saying since at least the Adams Street situation — and before that the whole Barkes Road business — that there is a pattern here, and patterns do not lie. I remember when the city repaved a stretch of Nob Hill back in, I want to say the late eighties, and they sent someone around to knock on doors on the affected blocks. An actual person. With a flyer. I cannot tell you exactly who authorized that or what department it came from, but I know it happened because my mother's neighbor on that block told her about it and she told me, and we both agreed at the time that it was the right way to handle things. That was the standard once. What happened to that standard is a question I will be asking until someone gives me an answer, or until I run out of column, whichever comes first.
And another thing — I know I said I had questions about the permit office closing on Fridays, and I am not going to relitigate that whole situation here because I already wrote that column and you can look it up — but I will say this: if you are the kind of person who has a drainage problem on your property and needs a permit to fix it, which you do, because that is how permits work, and you find out about your drainage problem on a Tuesday and you need to get to the permit office before things get worse, you now have to work around a Friday closure that runs through June and hope your drainage waits. The permit office says walk-ins can schedule appointments instead, which is fine, I suppose, if you have the kind of drainage emergency that is willing to hold. Mine never are. The one time I had a situation in my backyard that involved standing water and a very unhappy circumstance near the foundation, it did not wait for an appointment. It simply continued being a situation. I imagine the people on Gilbert Drive right now understand exactly what I mean — drainage does not operate on a pilot program schedule, and neither do the people who actually live here.
That's all for this week. You know where to find me.