Two Crookston residents used Monday night’s Crookston forum during the City Council meeting to question how the City handles snow around residential properties. David Regeimbal and Emily Harrington both came forward with their concerns. Regeimbal asked why the City wasn’t enforcing calendar parking, was plowing three to four feet of snow into driveways and why they are widening streets at this time and dumping large amounts of snow into driveways. Regeimbal stated he had to hire a payloader to clear the end of his driveway on Park Lane.
Public Works Director Pat Kelly said the ordinance regarding calendar parking changed several years ago to only include snow emergencies. The City has yet to declare a snow emergency since the emergency notification system was recently updated with Polk County and most residents aren’t registered and wouldn’t get the information. “The change is the City would declare a snow emergency and notify residents which side of the street they can park on that evening,” said Kelly. “They would be contacted by the emergency one-call system, or whatever, used to be instant alert, but I can’t remember the name of it now. Until we do declare a snow emergency which we haven’t yet on any of these because a majority of the population isn’t signed up for this anyways making it very difficult. Right now, we’re just working around it, so no right now there is no calendar parking. There is still a year-round ordinance that a car can’t be parked on the street for more than 24 hours.”
Kelly said until the City feels they can notify most people they likely won’t declare a snow emergency. “Really until we can get to a point, we feel confident we can get the majority of people notified we probably aren’t going to declare a snow emergency unless we’re bordering on a catastrophic event,” said Kelly. “At this point, we’re able to work around a lot of it. Sometimes the parked cars are difficult, but sometimes the worse thing in the bad storms are the people that do venture out and get stuck in the middle of the street making it more difficult. Obviously, if we could have everybody not park on the street that would be best and if people can get their cars off the street when snow is forecast it will keep the street wider, keep you from getting a second shot of snow when we come back to clear out where the cars were parked.”
Residents can register for the Everbridge Emergency Alert system with the Polk County Sheriff’s Office by using this link, searching Polk County Emergency notification system or calling the Polk County Sheriff’s Office at 281-2029.
Kelly also said that there isn’t a whole lot of opportunity to widen resident streets and they need to take advantage of that opportunity when they can and its hard with the big banks too not create a sort of new snow event because they need to use the motor grader. “When we’re out widening the street, generally its with our motor graders and the wings,” said Kelly. “We need something bigger when the banks get so wide and there is much snow it gets really difficult for the trucks to push that. We also have a one-way blade we can put our front end loader. When you’re widening streets the plow is carrying a bunch of snow and widening out, and when it comes to an opening will empty it. There was even talk if you have a reversible blade about going zip-zip back and forth which may work fine if you’ve got a block or two between entrances. In some of these neighborhoods every 30 feet you have a driveway, you can’t maneuver that plow blade that quickly. Certainly, we are looking at options but it’s not quite that simple.”
Harrington also expressed concern with the plowing during last week’s storm stating that after she had finished shoveling the grader came by and packed a fresh one to two feet of snow at the mouth of her driveway and created a three-foot pile in the walkway from the street to the front sidewalk. She spoke with KROX Tuesday about her concerns. “It was one to two feet tall and packed in there,” said Harrington. “I’m a senior citizen, I was tired, I was cold and disgusted. We can’t afford to pay every time we need to have that cleared out. We certainly keep it clean most of the time ourselves between my husband and I and our good neighbor but this was such a big job to tackle.”
She’d like the City to come with a solution to remove the hard-compacted snow from the end of driveways. “I think that something could easily be in place when we have severe winter and so much snow to move,” said Harrington. “It’s really not every year, and certainly not often during one winter when that would need to be done. It really is a hardship for folks to keep their driveways open when there is so much hard-compacted snow and so cold.”
While she said she appreciates the city crews working hard to clear and remove snow piles at intersections, they should consider the residents who don’t have the same powerful tools the city does to keep walkways and driveways passable. “I think that when there is such a large amount of snow to clear and it gets piled up one, two and even three feet high neighbors or snowblowers aren’t maybe willing to try to get through that so you’re looking at some kind of bobcat,” said Harrington. “In the meantime, you’re not able to carry on any business or appointments you may have because you can’t drive through that. If the City could hire someone or appoint someone, to follow behind the plows or open bids to folks who have their own equipment and just clean up entrances after the plows are done with the street.”
Kelly says financial and manpower constraints would make something like this difficult. “There are financial constraints, we don’t have an endless pot of money to do this and we just don’t have the manpower to come behind,” said Kelly. “People have an expectation in this town that when the plows go out all the streets are cleared within eight hours and that just wouldn’t be the case here. We’ve done that on occasion when we’re cutting ice with the two motor graders going in tandem and a loader or skid steer following them but you’re looking at two and a half days to get through the town here. Manpower wise we don’t have the equipment or manpower to do that on all five of our routes all over town at the same time. It gets to be difficult unless we do hire contractors although they seem to be fairly busy on all the other stuff going on in town. Obviously, that’s a cost and right now that’s not considered in our budgets.”
Councilman Bobby Baird guaranteed the residents that this would be addressed at the City strategy meeting on March 30 and Mayor Guy Martin asked Kelly to think of some alternatives to what we’re doing now and bring some ideas to the strategy session. Martin said he felt Public Works is best suited to come up with ideas. “I felt they understand the process better than we do,” said Martin. “They know their equipment and the time frame they have to get the streets clean. I figured they’d be a good asset to giving us some insight into making a decision.”
An increase to manpower or equipment for snow removal would likely be adjusted through a tax levy, but Kelly says they are always looking for ways to improve. “Obviously, we’re always looking to try to do things better,” said Kelly. “Snow removal and snow plowing are always a difficult subject, it always is. Sidewalk shoveling is a difficult one too. We’ll probably gather some information here and present it to the council and then it’s up to them if they choose to go that route or not. Between $15-20,000 increase in taxes is equivalent to a one percent levy increase. The kind of money we’re probably looking at increasing our budget by would be a pretty significant levy increase in and of itself so that will be up to the council to determine that.”
Xavier Davis also returned for the second straight meeting to talk about affordable transportation and gave the board an updated number of signatures on his petition for the affordable transportation discussion at 296. He also mentioned he had spoken with Jason Carlson, CEO at Tri-Valley Opportunity Council and they had discussed a possible one-year pilot program to see what the late-night needs were throughout the year. Councilman Steve Erickson mentioned he had seen Facebook messages about Lyft services starting in Crookston soon. Davis added he is very confident that the concern is being addressed and looked at throughout the community.
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