Andrew Rogers named new city street commissioner

Andrew Rogers

New Greencastle Street Commissioner Andrew Rogers has a job he initially didn’t want, and now he couldn’t be happier about it.

“I turned it down the first time,” the 33-year-old Rogers said when Mayor Bill Dory extended the offer to put him in charge of the city’s Department of Public Works. “But after I was doing the job when Brad (Phillips) retired, I realized I could do it and put in my application.”

And now he’s making good on that second chance to make a first impression, earning rave reviews from the mayor at the recent City Council meeting when he was introduced.

“Andrew and his team took one of our low-mileage but older pickup trucks, took the rusted bed off and made a flat-bed deck. Rather than buy a new truck, it’s refurbished and hopefully will continue to serve the city for a number of years.”

Rogers said the 1998 GMC has only 52,000 miles. Because the new flat bed, the crew repainted the whole frame and put on two new tires.

“We can put a salt bed on it if we need to,” Rogers said, looking ahead the ice and snow of winter. “We can put a plow on it. We’ve got a plow from one of our old trucks that was totaled.”

The truck is also handy for hauling barricades around town for First Friday, the Farmers Market and various detours or street closings.

The Street Department has 11 trucks all told, counting one-, and two-ton trucks and pickups. It has two leaf vacuums, one as old as 2006, and a 2014 street sweeper.

Rogers, who has been with the department nine years this October, know it’s currently the honeymoon phase. It’s three months until leaf collection dominates his time and probably four until snow and ice descends upon us.

In the meantime, as city streets become Mr. Rogers’ neighborhood his crew has been trimming back trees from around stopsigns and to make the path of the leaf vacs easier. Then there are those potholes, and of course, misguided phone calls complaining about U.S. 231, which is under state jurisdiction, not the city’s.

A 2008 Southmont High School graduate, Rogers grew up initially around Brick Chapel before the family relocated to New Market.

He and his wife Danielle have three children, two boys and a girl with one each in first and second grade and the other too young to start school.