No Snowfall Bulges Financial Windfall For Public Works Budget

With the official start of spring just 24 days away, Bridgeport has compiled a record-breaking trace of snow saving the Public Facilities Department $500,000, according to city officials, an amount that could swell in the coming weeks based on the extended forecast. (Beware the announcer’s curse.)

The city has received less than an inch of snow this winter measured against an annual average of roughly 30 inches, according to the National Weather Service.

As a result of the mild weather it’s prematurely leafy out there.

The savings includes sand, salt, gasoline, plow and truck maintenance and private contractors when needed.

In this mayoral election year, pot hole maintenance and paving should be at a premium.

It wasn’t always that way back in the days of Bridgeport’s penny-pinching Socialist Mayor Jasper McLevy, 1933-’57, who preferred the organic way to clean streets of snow: the sun.

From my book Only In Bridgeport.

IT’S THE SPRING OF 1939 AND BRIDGEPORT’S Public Works Director Pete Brewster is taking another needling about his tardy snow-removal operations from reporters. The scene is Billy Princes’ bar on State Street, where the truth or the near-truth about city operations flowed freely for a good many years. “Napoleon,” as Brewster’s scribe friends called him, grew angrier with each sip of his beer and each jab from the probing reporters.

How, they repeatedly insisted, could Brewster allow so much time to elapse before firing up city snowplows to clear the streets? Brewster, of course, had been smarting since the previous November when the Herald had plowed him for “waiting ’til the sun shines” to clear the streets of snow. “Napoleon fails to fight storm, thousands suffer,” the scandal sheet’s headline declared. “Sole responsibility for the terrible condition of Bridgeport streets following last weekend’s double snowstorm rests with Director of Public Works Peter P. ‘Napoleon’ Brewster,” crowed the story’s opening paragraph. In addition, for practically every week that winter, the Herald poked fun at Brewster’s snowplowing direction. After all, the city had initially appropriated only $300 in the budget to cover the cost of snow and ice clearance that year.

So, with several months of persistent nagging catching up to him, Brewster picked this moment in Billy Prince’s to break his long-standing silence. “Let the Guy who put the snow there take it away,” he cut loose. Bridgeporters were never satisfied by the excuses given for the lack of snow removal, but this was the Depression, and although many vociferous complaints about mushing through the snow had piled up, residents had by then grown accustomed to their penny-pinching Socialist Mayor Jasper McLevy.

With each passing winter and with more taxpayers’ complaints about the snow-covered streets, the story of how Jasper McLevy said “God put the snow there, let Him take it away,” has been told countless times in front of fireplaces, in snow-stranded vehicles and yes, in bars. Jasper McLevy, down through the years, involuntarily received the credit for a line coined by his long-time and trusted employee, but for Bridgeport it represented a sign of the times and the tight spending of a reform mayor who helped lift Bridgeport out of bankruptcy and out of the dog days of the Depression.