Contractor calls out city for crumbling curb conditions

Opinion

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This article was published 26/04/2017 (2560 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The owner of a company that does snow removal for the city — one of the contractors who has been taking the brunt of the public blame for the condition of street curbs — was moved to offer his side of the story.

You could call it push-back. Although, under the circumstances, plow-back seems more fitting.

The contractor — I’ll call him Dave – wasn’t trying to shirk responsibility for the carnage being done to our curbs.

“We’re beating up the concrete,” he acknowledged. “Absolutely.”

But so are city crews, he reminded me. “They’re out there doing damage, as well.” Not purposely, of course. And not, Dave argued, because his workers are any less or any more conscientious than city crews.

Or, as he initially responded in an email sent Saturday: “Our operators are not totally careless. We have to pay for the damages. Ask how many city employees pay for their damages.”

The city doesn’t dock its own plow operators if they damage curbs. The repairs are covered by the general concrete repair budget, a spokeswoman said.

Dave blamed the ongoing destruction partly on the age of the concrete and partly on a city snow-clearing policy called “curb-to curb.” Dave can’t do much about either, but the city could.

What’s the curb-to-curb policy? Dave explained: “Snow machine operators are told that they have to scrape against curbs in order to “show curb.”

The more they plow each year, the more wear and tear they do on the curbs. “Consequently, old rotten curbs fall apart,” he said.

I asked Dave if there’s a solution.

“Of course,” Dave said. “Don’t make the contractors scrape down to a broken curb that you haven’t replaced in 50 years, and you won’t do as much damage.”

That curb-to-curb “guideline” for snow removal, as Dave calls it, is used as a quality measurement. But even though he estimates curb-to-curb plowing has been around for about 40 years, there was a time when the city didn’t require the plows’ blades to go right to the curb.

“At one time it was ‘within reason’ — within six inches of the curb.”

Supervisors got out of their vehicles and kicked the curb to make sure the plow cut was close enough.

“Now, they want to see curb showing all the time,” Dave said. “Well, I’ll tell you, we’ve got a 40-ton, 50-ton machine with a blade on it rubbing against that curb.”

The damage done this year seems worse than ever, I suggested. Again, he blamed that on the age of the concrete. “The curbs have never been replaced on some of those streets since (they) were built in the 1950s,” he said.

Then there’s the damage done to the boulevards because the city requires contractors to scrape the snow piles away to make room for the next pile from the next snowfall.

Dave said he pays anywhere from $50,000 to nearly $100,000 in a bad year for damage done by his plows to city streets.

So why, if the contractors are paying for, or actually doing the repairs, do we still have so many broken and non-existent curbs? Because, Dave suggested, the city isn’t budgeting enough to fix the damage their own crews do or renew the crumbling old curbs. And they’re not doing enough block-by-block replacement.

“They need to address that as part of the renewal process,” Dave said.

Dave believes the city could help mitigate some of the damage done by snowplows by dropping the curb-to-curb policy and going back to the “within reason” guideline. He also believes the city should change its winter parking bylaw and use a model where vehicles park on one side of the street one day and on the other the next. That would allow his crews to plow one side of the street one night — without trying to dodge parked cars and hitting curbs in the process — and then plow straight on the other side the next night. Dave’s a realist about all of this, and as much as he believes those changes would help, he knows changing city processes isn’t enough.

That brought him back to his plow-back against the commonly held belief private contractors and their operators deserve most of the blame for what’s happening to our streets.

“If you want to have clean boulevards, you’ve got to scrape the boulevard down. There’s an expectation that we’re going to go out there with kid gloves on and not do any damage, there’s not going to be any wear and tear. That the pixie dust is going save everything,” Dave said.

“Well,” Dave concluded, “I don’t own any pixie dust. And neither do you.”

gordon.sinclair@freepress.mb.ca