To the Editor:                                    
 In September of 2018 I brought a number of Berne highway department safety issues to the attention of the board and the superintendent of highways.   

I proposed a rational and objective discussion of the issues in an open meeting, but the agenda never reflected my requests. 

I proposed objectively discussing engineering consultant services as a means to advise the department on issues that I saw as dangerous and/or wasteful. This would provide independent, objective and professional guidance for the superintendent. 

My efforts were stonewalled, and I was repeatedly distracted by bogus investigations of my “misconduct” at my workplace by Highway Superintendent Randy Bashwinger, and then at the town hall by Councilman Dennis Palow and Supervisor Sean Lyons.  

These bogus investigations by their secretly hired lawyer went on for years and all the ridiculous allegations were eventually determined to be without merit. I endured bogus investigations and allegations of misconduct at the federal, state, county, and town levels while these people did nothing to address my highway department safety concerns.  

During that time, two very serious incidents have occurred; one fatal. This is not a big operation so these accidents are very significant.

I put together a slideshow in September 2018 that documented some examples of very hazardous guide-rail features resulting from years of neglect and very poor design.  

In order to address a problem, it needs to first be identified and discussed. But I was accused back then by the supervisor of creating a dangerous situation by not bringing each of the issues to the superintendent of highways as I photographed them.  According to him, valuable time to address the hazards was lost in the time it took me to compose the document.  

Nothing has been done to address those hazards in the years that have passed since! 

We have had plenty of time to begin evaluating and prioritizing the many design and maintenance issues. We should be chipping away at the guide rail safety issues and correcting the worst-case priorities first. This would require a process and would take some time.

We have had time and still do. 

We are fortunate that our highway volume is so low that we can anticipate few collisions with these very dangerous, poorly designed and nearly totally unmaintained guide rail systems. But “accidents” do eventually happen when there is little interest in establishing and maintaining safe operations at the Berne Highway Department. 

The Bridge Road incident and the fatal incident at the highway garage happened because safety standards and processes appear to not be a priority with Mr. Bashwinger.  It's all politics with this guy. 

Before I retired from the state’s department of transportation (DOT), engineers often consulted me on guide rail issues, and I often designed particularly difficult guide rail situations for them. It was something I did as I found time between reviewing local, state and interstate projects in a quality control position.  

Prior to that, when I worked in design, I had become a go-to guy where bridge rail, guide rail and transition decisions were necessary. I had worked my way up through the ranks in highway and bridge design beginning in 1983, and I was repeatedly trained in roadside and guide rail design in the years that followed. All my work had to be approved and stamped by professional engineers and I was on a first-name basis with the statewide DOT rail expert.  

Bridge rehabilitations present very difficult rail decisions.  The engineers trusted me to design guide rail and bridge rail systems.  I was the designer of record on a number of significant projects in the area like the Dunn Bridge rehabilitation. So I designed bridge and guide rail systems as a project designer beginning in 1989 as designer of the  Route 23 bridge over Jerome Avenue  in  Cairo and ended my career as project reviewer and an in-house guide rail and bridge rail consultant. In my review position I often provided significant changes to bridge rail and guide rail plans submitted by consultant engineers to DOT for review. 

I provide my rail résumé here to make it clear that I am confident that the guide rail systems in Berne are very poorly designed (if designed at all).  I am also very confident that the maintenance of these systems by the current highway superintendent is totally inadequate and very dangerous, well-documented in the slideshow published below. I can say with complete confidence that many of our guide rail systems in Berne are themselves an extreme hazard.

The new slideshow documents years of neglect at the hands of the Berne GOP and very poorly designed systems. It is predictable that someone will be seriously injured or killed striking the rail systems that I believe we need to begin replacing as soon as possible. 

Please look through the slideshow photos.  These are just a few specific guide rail issues that were featured in my 2018 presentation and remain unaddressed. There are many other issues that can be documented. 

There has clearly been no attempt to correct these hazardous deficiencies that were specifically identified in 2018! This is gross negligence in my opinion.

Joel Willsey

Berne Town Councilman