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The New Look

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Parent Issue
Day
19
Month
November
Year
1975
OCR Text

JAMES WATTS

Environmental Protection & Maintenance

James W. Watts, who took over as director of Detroit's office of Environmental Protection and Maintenance in January 1974, has known and worked with Mayor Young for thirty years. Watts is on leave of absence from his job at the United Auto Workers, where he has worked for 25 years and is currently national coordinator of the union's Community Action Programs. His administrative skills have been molded in bargaining sessions with General Motors and Chrysler.

Watts was born in Macon, Georgia, and raised in Detroit. He attended Pershing High and Cass Technical High. He has degrees from Wayne State and the Detroit College of Law.

Watts says he was faced with an insensitive civil-service bureaucracy upon taking over his department. He felt the prevailing "do-nothing" attitude had to be changed.

One of his major priorities was to carry through the Mayor's affirmative action programs. His department has had few black foremen in the past, so he made a black man general foreman over the downtown section of the sanitation department. He initiated a program to train 25 women as auto mechanics; these women now repair city vehicles. He would eventually like to have women supervisors in waste collection and women working off the sanitation trucks.

Watts is interested in initiating curbside collections on a citywide basis. He points out that if garbage is allowed to be placed in alleys, people may let it pile up all week; if they must place it on the curb, they generally wait until the day before pickup to put out the trash. Although Watts' experimental program on the west side has been highly successful, he has to convince a reticent Common Council before broadening it.

Watts has begun to decentralize his department: a pilot program in the northern district makes one inspector responsible for that area. Watts feels that if one inspector is responsible for keeping vacant lots clean, sweeping streets, and picking up trash on time in a given district, the department will be able to provide better service.

In order to make the department more accountable to the taxpayer, Watts has started a complaint section. He also hopes to put identification plates on his trucks. If residents have a problem with any employee on the truck, they would then be able to identify that employee in a complaint. Watts feels this will also give the workers a greater sense of pride in their work.

- Albert Nickerson

ANN BESER

Farm-A-Lot

Ann Beser, as the 30-year-old director of Mayor Young's Farm-a-lot program, offers hungry Detroiters a unique solution to soaring food prices. 

It works like this: When a property owner fails to pay taxes on a vacant lot for three years or more, the lot can be taken over by the state. The state then turns its Detroit lots over to the city, which is more or less stuck with them if no buyer appears.

After having been given 3,000 lots throughout the city this way, Mayor Young decided the property had to be used one way or another. He decided to offer them to residents for urban mini-farms, and Mrs. Beser was given the responsibility for coordinating the program. 

According to Mrs. Beser, the federal government refused to provide funding for the new self-help program, but some local businesses helped out with donations - notably the J.L Hudson Company, which provided a 22-quart pressure canning unit.

Out of the 500 lots initially given Mrs. Beser, 300 have been farmed so far, yielding an average of $139 worth of produce per lot. She believes that with improved farming methods and expertise, the yield could be upped to $500 to $800 per lot.

Six people from surrounding community worked on each lot.  According to Mrs. Beser, 39 percent of the urban farmers were employed. One local Boy Scout troop worked a lot and sold the crops door to door at minimal price. The scouts also won a blue ribbon with their crops at the State Fair in October.

Mrs. Beser feels the program has been good for the city "psychologically." "When one feels one is nothing, she notes, "then on is nothing." She adds  that her program helps give participants a feeling of self-esteem through this creative a productive use of their idle time - and idle land.

- Joseph McDaniel II [text cuts off]