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Street Still Not Cleared? Blame This Guy
By
Lauren Evans
Published Feb 6, 2014
Modified Feb 6, 2014
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By
Lauren Evans
Published Feb 6, 2014
Modified Feb 6, 2014
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Who is John Doherty? He's the city's 75-year-old Sanitation Commissioner, and he's taken a fair amount of crap in the decades he's held the job.
The Times today delves into the personal life of the city's reigning Most Beleaguered Man, a man to whose head this very publication has in the past added goat horns. (It's a great picture.) His reputation took a pummeling during the high-profile mishandling of the 2010 blizzard, but he's stuck around.
Frankly, though, Doherty isn't even supposed to be here right now, having delayed his retirement so he could ease the transition of a new mayor into office. ("Winter is war," one Sanitation source told the Daily News in December. "It’s not the time to change horses midstream.”) On Wednesday he stood beside that mayor, stone-faced and probably thinking about how he should have stuck to his plan to reinvent himself as a pastry chef. At the conclusion of the press conference, de Blasio didn't even thank him.
Complaints have wafted in from Staten Island, Doherty's birthplace and home for decades, on how the Sanitation Department has neglected them, with reports of roads untouched by the healing arm of the city's plows, or overly-aggressive plows mowing down trees. “It’s a little depressing on some days, no doubt about it,” he told the Times. “You’ve got 24-hour TV; you’ve got Twitter; you’ve got social media. Today, they want to see the street down to pavement, no matter what time the storm hit, and no matter what the temperatures were.”
What is it, then, that keeps Doherty on the job? “This kind of life keeps you going, keeps you young,” he said, having briefly retired to the largely snow-less California before getting "bored." The $200,000 paycheck probably doesn't hurt, either.
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department of sanitation
john doherty
Lauren Evans
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