PennDOT rebuffs commissioner’s charges

By DAVID HULSE

MILFORD, PA — PennDOT says Pike Commissioner Richard Caridi got it wrong.

The Dunmore district office of the state highway agency responded last week to charges that Caridi made about lackluster state snow removal efforts on April 27, which appeared in the May 5 edition of The River Reporter.

Caridi said in part that due to mass-transit-funding issues PennDOT resources had been moved out of Pike and other rural areas, that staffing had been cut and that budgeted sub-contractors employed for snow removal had not been hired.

In an agency statement, Community Relations Officer David Krisanda denied these charges. He said that no resources have been moved out of rural areas, that no staff cuts have been made and that Caridi’s data about sub-contractors was correct.

“PennDOT has not reduced its complement in Pike County, or in the rest of the state, since the late 1970s and early 1980s. The number of authorized employees in Pike County and throughout Pennsylvania has remained constant since then,” Krisanda stated.

Regarding contracted snowplow operators, Krisanda said Caridi’s remark that the agency only hired half of the 14 contractors that were authorized was “not true.”

The agency was approved in Pike for a staff of 21 PennDOT trucks and two contractors, Krisanda said. In the beginning of the winter season only one snow and ice removal contractor was available, but by the end of the season, three contractors were on board in Pike County.

PennDOT has had some difficulty finding snow removal contractors in Pike County willing to do the work; in fact, one of the contractors used to clear snow in Pike County this past winter came from Lackawanna County, Krisanda said.

Learning of the PennDOT response, Caridi said, “All the information I used came from our Road Task Force meetings. Those meetings were attended by up to 40 people including PennDOT representatives. No one challenged them at the time and no one else has challenged me about these comments, and they’ve appeared in all the local papers.”