City Howl Help Desk: Wacky wires in Fishtown

FOR AT LEAST two months, someone forgot about a mess of downed wires in Fishtown. The wires hung in the air over the sidewalk, forcing anyone in their path to duck out of the way. Neighbors wanted it fixed. And so did we.

Now, we admit the wires weren't live, meaning they weren't dangerous. (Neighbors knew this because every child who passed by grabbed at the wires. Probably not the best way to test them. We do not recommend this.)

But so what? They were eyesores. They shouldn't just hang there forever.

Oh, and there was something else that made the wires a problem: They were knotted vaguely in the shape of a noose. Unintentionally, we presume.

"It's a hangman's noose," said Gary Preston, who grew up in the house across the street.

Diane Farley, who lives a few blocks away, also saw the resemblance. "I'm clumsy," she said. "I'm gonna walk by it and hang myself."

Preston said the wires came down right about when the house next door to theirs got demolished. The wires were initially hanging straight down, touching the sidewalk, but someone came and knotted them, they said. In an effort, we guess, to improve the situation?

No one, to our knowledge, called 3-1-1 or alerted any utilities about the problem.

SO THAT'S WHAT WE DID: We put out a couple of calls to possible culprits: Peco, Comcast, Verizon. Once Comcast realized it owned the wires, a crew got rid of them immediately. Spokeswoman Alisha Martin said it was the first Comcast had heard about the wires.

As long as you can identify the owners of the wires, the fix is easy. So, how do you do that? First, call 3-1-1. If the wire isn't live, your complaint will go to the Streets Department's Right-of-Way Unit, which will determine the wire owners and alert them, said Andrew Stober, chief of staff at the Mayor's Office of Transportation and Utilities. And in case the utility doesn't fix the problem, the city has started sending utility bosses monthly reports about service requests that are still at large, Stober said. That's what Help Desk is talking about!

CONDO CONUNDRUM: Last week we also spoke with some condo-dwellers who told us that life in a high-rise is just peachy (one even took us up to see her view), except for one thing: They have to pay extra for trash collection.

"It's a terrible injustice," said Leonard Kornit, who has lived in Kennedy House, the largest co-op in the city, for two decades.

The city offers weekly trash collection for condos, but that's not enough, said Kennedy House's building manager Jim Giblin. With almost 30 floors of units, Kennedy House, at 19th Street and JFK Boulevard, can't store all the trash its residents produce for a whole week, so residents must pay extra - roughly $80 per unit per year, Giblin said - for a private hauler to collect their trash more often than weekly. As a result, some decline the city pickup.

Yet condo residents don't carry any less of a tax burden. City Councilmen Jim Kenney and Frank DiCicco last month proposed an up-to-$200-per-unit tax rebate for trash collection from condos.

Though Council recommended the bill for approval, the Nutter administration has been clear that it wants nothing to do with it. After all, the city offers the same weekly trash-collection service to all residents, administration staffers have said. Condo residents choose to live in a place where weekly collection isn't enough - they signed up for this. And anyway, lots of people pay taxes for services they don't use. Not everyone has a child in the public schools, for instance.

If implemented, Kenney and DiCicco's bill would cost the city about $6 million a year. Kornit said he wasn't aware of the extra trash cost when he moved into a condo.

We have an idea: How about condo management informs prospective residents of this extra trash fee? That way everyone's on the same page. It's not clear when the bill will be called up, a Kenney staffer told us, so condo-dwellers will just have to wait and see.

Juliana Reyes reports for It's Our Money, a joint project of the Daily News and WHYY funded by the William Penn Foundation seeking to explain where your tax dollars are going.