We talk about it as a street sweeper but in Cortez it is used as a dust blower. The people operating these machines go down the street blowing dust on everything and everyone.
This isn’t cleaning anything. It is just blowing dust and small gravel off of the street onto someone else’s private property.
This small gravel lands in our driveways and cracks the surface of the concrete when we drive over it.
Everything we own gets covered with dust. If we have open windows in our house, which is common this time of year, it is a terrible mess and a lot of work to clean up.
Worst of all, these dust blowers go down the street with the operator in his air-tight cab and create a cloud of dust that hangs over the city for hours. Can anyone imagine the filth and types of bacteria that float around in this dust cloud — and we are all breathing it in.
I have never seen this anywhere else that I have ever lived and that includes countries in South America and Africa. I think that there is a simple solution to this: If they can’t operate the machines the way they were built to work, park these dust blowers.
Take the operators and a lot more city employees out of their vehicles, give them a broom and a dust pan and let them do a day’s work rather than just riding around at taxpayer expense.
Or better yet, let’s hire a task force to look into this problem.
Teresa Campbell
Cortez