The last snow clearing effort by the city during the huge snowfall, rain, freeze, snow, etc; leaves a lot to be desired, and brings up a number of issues that need to be looked into.
The motion put on the floor by Councillor Koehler and seconded by Councillor Frizzell at the last council meeting requested that a committee be struck to do a post-mortem on how the snow removal was handled, and to see what could be done to improve it. At the request of the mayor the motion was rescinded to give administration time to do their own in-house review and report back to council on the Feb. 24 meeting.
If the report to council on Feb. 24 does not satisfy council or the public at large, then we need to move forward with the post-mortem, and hopefully Koehler, and Frizzell will put forward another motion.
We need to know what went wrong and we need to know now. It is not good enough to give us some generalities, and then consider the issue to be settled. We pay sufficient taxes for snow removal, and we deserve to get value for our dollars. Clearly this was not the case in the latter part of December and January.
This was a very serious issue, and cannot be swept under the rug. We have instances of people being unable to get out of their driveways, or to use the sidewalks. We had buses with passengers stuck in the snow, we have numerous car accidents, and many people who were slipping, falling and injuring themselves. Furthermore, in a 28 day period we had some people who were plowed four times, while others were not plowed once. We had alley ways, parking lots, etc. plowed, while residential areas were ignored.
We have a snow budget of some $5 million dollars of which $2.5 million goes to wages and benefits, and the balance, to non-salary expenses. This money is basically for a five month period for snow removal, and amounts to approx one million per month, so we can say with some certainty that money is not the problem. So where does the problem lie? That's why we need this committee.
Lets ensure that this committee is formed and we get some answers.
Eric Allen
Prince George
