By Adam Swift
In his first meeting as Ward 1 Councillor on Monday night, James Mercurio picked up where his good friend and current at-large Councillor Joanne McKenna left off, introducing several Beachmont-related traffic motions alongside McKenna.
McKenna and Mercurio’s first motion of the new session asked the mayor to request the Department of Conservation and Recreation to repair the street lights on Winthrop Parkway along Short Beach.
McKenna said the lights have been destroyed by motor vehicle accidents and have not been repaired since September.
Over the past four or five years, there have been motorists driving faster and taking out more streetlights along Winthrop Parkway.
“There have been more streetlights on Winthrop Parkway that have been taken out in the last four years,” said McKenna. “I put a motion in four months ago that the state police go down there and slow the traffic down because they are speeding. Two lights are totally missing at Short Beach, three lights are out on Winthrop Parkway, and one of those lights is crucial because it is on a crosswalk and you have to cross three lanes and it’s really dark down there.”
McKenna said she would also like to see a representative from National Grid address the council about the issue, since she said they will have to do the work to replace the lights. In addition to the lights along the parkway, the councillor said there are street lights out across the city and that the ward councillors could possibly provide a list of broken street lights to National Grid.
Mercurio said he agreed with McKenna that it is a dangerous situation along Winthrop Parkway and Short Beach.
“There are like five lights that are out; as soon as you go around the curve, there are two lights that are out on the beach,” he said. “We need to get this fixed, this is a public safety issue and it’s gone on too long. “This is (McKenna’s) second time on this motion, and we really need to put a fire under someone’s butt.”
McKenna and Mercurio also introduced a motion asking the mayor to request MassDOT to repair potholes on the westerly side of Revere Beach Parkway, especially in the right-hand lane, from the police station to the intersection of Route 16.
“I put this motion in about a month ago, and it’s still not fixed, and now the potholes are getting bigger,” said McKenna. “This is a very heavily traveled road, and I just can’t understand why they just can’t go out there, especially now that it is pretty warm and we are having a thaw, and they are not doing it.”
Ward 2 Councillor Ira Novoselsky said he did contact some staff at the DCR maintenance yard and that he believed that some of the potholes were fixed, but that with the bad weather, more have popped up.
Novoselsky asked to also be included on the motion, and said he would contact the DCR maintenance workers again about addressing the issue.
