Potholes, dark streets, and dead trees: Why city services can take weeks

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How long does it take to change a light bulb? On Belleville Avenue, the answer is at least six months.

Sara Botelho said that’s how long she’s been begging the city to replace the streetlight across from her house. She has to use a flashlight when she goes out at night, and she’s scared because she sees people congregating around the storage facility nearby after hours.

“We’re just here in the dark,” she said to The Light. “I never know if there’s somebody here.”

Two blocks away, Sarah Nelligan smoked a cigarette on her back porch and looked out at the city-owned empty lot next to her home. The enormous tree on the property didn’t bloom last year. It seemed dead, so Nelligan submitted a request to the city in June asking it to be removed. The tree is still there.

It isn’t leaning, but Nelligan said she’s worried it could eventually fall on her house.

“It would be nice to see some movement on this request,” she said. “Our neighborhood tends to get neglected.”

Nelligan’s request has been pending longer than almost any other request for city services submitted last year.

Across New Bedford, the wait time for city services can range from less than a day to weeks or months, a Light data analysis found. Through the state public records law, The Light obtained 1,157 requests submitted in 2025 through NBConnected, the city’s new online 311 platform. The city provided only requests that users marked as “public.”

Requests for tree-related services, street lighting, and potholes were the most common. The city also received dozens of requests about overflowing trash bins, sidewalk issues, litter, and graffiti. 

Among the 930 requests that were closed last year, a quarter took two days or less. Half were closed within about a week. Three-quarters were closed within three weeks.

Dozens of requests took more than two months to close. The longest closed request was a streetlight repair on South Sixth Street that took 188 days.

By the end of last year, there were 227 requests still open. About half of them were more than two months old, and a third were more than three months old. The oldest open request was submitted in June for tree trimming on Union Street. It’s still open.

“City Arborist inspected, tree will be trimmed as soon as possible,” the city wrote in a message on the request nine months ago, the most recent update on the ticket.

Jamie Ponte, head of the city’s Department of Public Infrastructure, said in an interview that a wide variety of factors affect response times. Staff prioritize requests with safety concerns or risks of property damage, he said. The department does its best to at least send someone to the scene of requests within a week to assess the situation and decide what to do next.

“With the resources that we have, we get to what we can get to,” he said.

It often comes down to staff availability, Ponte said. Dozens of positions in his department are vacant. Requests can also stall while the city waits for ordered hardware to arrive, or while it coordinates with private owners of infrastructure.

Sometimes requests are deemed closed well after the work was actually completed, because it took extra time for a supervisor to go to the location and check that it was done right, Ponte said.

Overall, he said the city’s response time is good.

“I would say 95-plus percent of the requests that we’ve received have been acted on in a timely, satisfactory way,” he said.

Utility poles are a group effort

Botelho, the Belleville Avenue resident, spent months making phone calls in vain to get her street lit again.

“It was a struggle to figure out who the pole belonged to,” Botelho said. “I just kept going around in circles.”

Nearly two-thirds of city streetlights are attached to utility poles that the city doesn’t own. They’re often owned by the utilities and communications companies that hang wires from them, such as Eversource, Comcast, Verizon, and AT&T.

Putting all that wiring and street lighting in one spot cuts down on the number of poles around the city. But it also spreads responsibility across a larger group of entities. Whenever a pole needs work, each entity has to take turns working on their equipment attached to it, and that adds time, Ponte explained. 

Botelho eventually determined that Verizon was responsible for the pole near her house. At some point, the city removed its light and a new pole appeared next to the old one. Botelho said the city told her it couldn’t put a new light on the new pole until Verizon resolved a work order on the pole replacement.

A Verizon spokesperson told The Light that the company owns this pole jointly with Eversource, but the streetlight is the city’s responsibility. They said the company had no record of an outstanding work order on the pole in the last six months that would interfere with the light repair.

Ponte said that all the utilities using that pole have to transfer their assets to the new pole one by one, and there can be half a dozen of them in line. The city goes last in the process.

“The reason we’re last is because our light becomes an impediment to their work of transferring wires from one pole to the other,” he said. “So, sometimes it does take a little while to do that coordination.”

Even in high-traffic areas near downtown and along Acushnet Avenue, street lighting requests can stay open for weeks or even months.

Of the 147 streetlight requests the city received last year, 65 were still open by the end of the year. Most of those open requests were unresolved for more than a month. Nine open requests were more than 100 days old. Closed streetlight requests usually took more than a week to resolve. 

When he reviewed the Light’s data analysis, Ponte said the city’s response time on street lights is “a little bit long.”

Sometimes fixing a light only takes a quick bulb replacement, but other times the city needs to order parts or wait for Eversource to handle the power feed underground. When a car hits a streetlight, the city might have to wait for the driver’s insurance to pay the city or replace the light. 

Ponte said his department has only one electrician to handle all of the city’s 10,839 streetlights and every traffic signal. The department used to have the budget for two electricians. But one of the positions went unfilled for years, long enough that the City Council cut it from the budget last year, Ponte said.

Electricians can get much higher pay in the private sector than with the city, he said. He said he hopes that, through bargaining with the union that represents skilled city infrastructure workers, he can raise the pay enough to attract another electrician.

Talking trees

Residents submitted 352 requests last year for a variety of tree concerns, including trimming, fallen branches, and removal. Half of the closed tree requests were resolved within two weeks. But dozens took more than two months, with a few staying open for three months.

And, as with street lighting requests, dozens more tree requests were still open by year’s end. Of 65 tree requests that were open at the end of 2025, 37 were more than three months old.

Ponte said delays can happen when the understaffed parks division gets too many requests at a time. He said the city prioritizes public safety issues and instances where homeowners say their insurance company is complaining about how close a tree is to their house.

“If it’s just a routine trim that’s not compromising public safety or something like that, it would not be prioritized,” he said.

Ponte hadn’t forgotten about the request submitted by Nelligan, the resident living next to a vacant city lot with a dead tree. He said the city plans to remove the tree, but it’s not being prioritized because it’s on a vacant lot. At one point, the city also had issues getting to it because of abandoned property in the way, he said.

Ka-thunk!

The city’s 98 closed pothole requests were resolved relatively quickly compared to other categories last year.

More than half the pothole requests were resolved within a week, and about three-quarters were resolved within two weeks. Still, the data showed seven requests took a month or two to resolve. One request to fill a pothole “five inches deep” on County Street was open for 117 days.

If you’ve noticed more potholes lately, you can thank last month’s blizzard. The cold temperatures and heavy snowplows took a toll on the city’s roads, Ponte said. 

“I think we all know the nature of potholes right now — there’s just a lot of them,” he said. “We have multiple crews out doing them constantly.”

Even now, a month after the city was battered with three feet of snow, Ponte said the city is still catching up with the impacts. The snow removal alone was a massive undertaking that lasted for days after the storm.

Ponte said the city is still triaging damage to trees, street signs, and streetlights tied to the storm. He estimated that crews were about 60% done filling the potholes that emerged after the snow melted.

“We’ll be responding to them for weeks to come,” he said. “We just can’t be in every place at once.”

Faster connections

Ponte said he’s pleased with how NBConnected has worked since the city launched it in February last year. It replaced the SeeClickFix platform the city was using for service requests at the time. The new platform cost $82,000 to develop, and the city pays a $100,000 annual fee to use it, The Light reported at the time.

NBConnected works better because it automatically assigns work orders, unlike SeeClickFix, which had a manual process. That means supervisors can address some requests almost immediately if they happen to be nearby when they get the notification.

The new platform is also more interactive than SeeClickFix was. The city can share updates as they work on a request, and residents can see the progress in real time.

Most people who submitted public requests last year sent only one or two, but some people submitted many more. One resident put in 106 requests, many of them in batches for multiple overflowing trash receptacles throughout the summer. The resident did not respond to The Light’s attempts to reach them.

Dozens of requests came from city councilors, including Ward 3 Councilor Shawn Oliver, who submitted 33 — the second most of any user. He said he likes the platform because it lets him check the progress of requests.

“I have found that this is a lot faster than our previous SeeClickFix system that we had,” he said.

Oliver’s closed requests had a median response time of four days, but he had his share of requests that took weeks. Four of his requests that were open at the end of last year were more than 100 days old — they included a rotted-out tree that was dropping branches, a broken pedestrian signal, and “possibly the worst case of sidewalk lifting I have seen yet.”

The councilor urged residents to be patient.

“We live in an age where nothing is really fast enough,” he said. “I don’t think it’s to the point where it warrants that the city isn’t moving efficiently or effectively with these requests.”

Email Grace Ferguson at gferguson@newbedfordlight.org

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