As snow and ice pile up around St. Albert, Mayor Cathy Heron took to social media this week to informally gather input on how the city should tackle residential snow removal.
Residential snow clearing costs the city around $435,000 every time it's done and takes about 10 days to complete.
While the city takes care of its main drags regularly, residential areas are another matter: St. Albert's current snow-clearing policy triggers residential street clearing when the level of packed snow reaches an average of six to nine centimetres. Heron said residential areas currently have a snowpack of about five centimetres.
She posed the question of whether residents want their snow removed now, or whether the city should wait for either a melt or for the pack to reach the required amount.
“I am torn,” Heron wrote on her Facebook page. “I live on a remote residential street. The conditions are not bad but I can see why some would want bare roads.”
By Thursday afternoon, more than 700 people had voted on the mayor’s poll with 68 per cent wanting to save money and wait for a melt. Residents also weighed in with their own stories of either getting stuck on residential streets or having difficulty navigating the ice that has built up around the city.
Mark Lanigan posted a comment criticizing the city’s handling of snow removal.
“For years it's hit and miss for residential (plowing),” he said. “When we first got that big dump of snow in November (about 25 centimetres) over a few days, that would have been perfect to (plow). Then weeks later, it rained and roads were horrible with ruts and so icy. If it were (plowed) it would have been easier to deal with as sand would have been required. We pay high taxes already and this is still an issue?”
Graeme Matichuk suggested the city place more sandboxes in neighbourhoods to help deal with the icy patches, an idea several commenters agreed with.
Ash Tonhauser, a self-described St. Albert resident and emergency services worker in Edmonton, felt the current clearing by this city was lacking.
“Just yesterday I went into an area in St. Albert and got my vehicle stuck because of the snow,” Tonhauser wrote on Thursday. “I have lived in the same community for six years and we have only had our roads cleared once a year if that. I have also personally pushed out many cars and hitched a few to the back of our truck to assist fellow residents due to the unmanaged roads in our area.”
But no matter how much green is left in the budget, the head of St. Albert’s winter maintenance promises the city will always go out to tackle the white stuff.
At the start of 2018, the city was showing a surplus of roughly $870,000 following a short snowfall in 2017. The city budgets for two clearings of collector roads each year at a cost of $90,000 per clearing. There are two residential clearings in the budget at $435,000 apiece.
John Potter, operations manager for infrastructure, roads and sidewalks, who took on the role in July, didn’t want to talk specifics when it came to the city’s snow-clearing budget but stressed St. Albert was in an “OK position."
“I’m kind of a superstitious person that way,” he said mid-December. “What drives my decisions is the policy and service levels regardless of where we are at in the budget. I don’t anticipate in the next little while to be an issue.”
The city’s snow-removal budget stretches across the calendar year, not the winter season. This means a heavy snowfall in 2018, for example, won’t impact the 2019 budget. Instead, the budget captures the last half of one winter and the first half of the next.
Potter said every winter is different.
“I’ve been in the snow and ice control business for about 15 years now in different jurisdictions for municipal governments,” he said. “No winter is the same but when you are budgeting for snow and ice control, you want to be budgeting for the average winter, not the extremes. The last two years would be a really good indication of that where we kind of had below-average snowfall accumulations. Last year was a quiet winter until the spring and then we got hit by a couple of bigger storms.”
With six standard plows, one backup and a grader, Potter explained snow removal can be an expensive operation where one or two bad storms can quickly eat up any surpluses the city may have.
