City of Greater Sudbury over budget for 2019 winter road maintenance

The City of Greater Sudbury has gone over the winter road maintenance budget for the first three months of 2019 by $2.9 million.

Randy Halverson, the director of Linear Infrastructure Services, says this is mainly due to the record snowfall that the city saw this past winter (from November 2018 to March 2019).

"About 13 feet of snow, that is a significant amount of snow, I would say typically in our environment we're about the 10 to 11 foot amount of snow on an annual basis," he said.

The city also saw severalsignificant weather events,back-to-back snow storms and freezing rain, which made things a little more difficult for the city to handle the clean up.

"The snow accumulation resulted in the need for 10 general call outs of our road maintenance staff," said Halverson.

A "general call out" is the term used when the city has to fully deploy all staff and contractors to deal with the winter weather, he says, which could be after a large amount of snow or freezing rain or a mixture of weather.

"When you combine snow and rain it tends to lead to very slippery conditions, very, very quickly. January and February saw almost twice the amount of snow, the net result of this snow across all areas in the city, we have recorded a much thicker snow pack and challenges with snow bank height and sight line issues," Halverson said.

The winter road maintenance budget, which is $18.5 million for this year, includes more than just snow removal and ploughing the streets, he says.

March is actually one of the busiest months for winter road maintenance, Halverson says, because it can include both winter and spring maintenance snow removal, ploughing, salting and sanding, street sweeping, opening drainage structures and pothole patching.

A motion was also presented Monday night by city councillorsDeb McIntosh and Geoff McCausland to look into what the city can do in the future to better handle significant weather events, such as the back-to-back winter storms that left the city ploughing and removing the snow for several days afterwards.

City staff will prepare a report outliningpossible protocols and policies for significant weather events and how to adjust the service required to deal with those events, in time for the 2019-2020 winter season.