The City of Orillia plans to look into ways of improving road and sidewalk clearing during extreme winter weather events.
At last week’s city council meeting, councillors Luke Leatherdale and Jay Fallis brought the idea forward, requesting a city staff report on options to improve response times, as well as options to improve snow removal on streets with limited storage space.
“Judging by this last snow event we had, it's clear that something really needs to change,” Leatherdale said, referencing a January storm that prompted a flurry of complaints.
That story in OrilliaMatters included a poll that asked a simple question: Did the city do an acceptable job plowing roads and sidewalks after this weekend's storm? Results showed 53 people thought the city did an acceptable job, while 292 people — or 85 per cent of respondents — were not satisfied with the city's efforts.
“I did a lot of outreach work myself; I went door to door and just asked people what their biggest complaints with things in the city are — the No. 1 thing is snow removal," said the Ward 2 councillor.
“I think we need to explore all options and anything to improve the situation.”
Fallis said snow removal is “fairly good” the majority of the time, except during the city’s more extreme winter weather events.
Given Orillia’s position between lakes Simcoe and Couchiching, Fallis stressed heavy snowfall is a fact of life in the city, but expressed concern with increasingly “concentrated” snow events due to climate change.
“Rather than snowfall being spread out over a long period of time, we're seeing a lot of snow coming in bursts,” he said. “Are there other things that we can explore to at least ensure that those days are better covered?”
"Sometimes streets will have limited snow storage capacity, and (we're) also asking staff to look at some potential options there, as well."
During the meeting, city staff spoke about a variety of upcoming and past reports on the city’s snow clearing efforts — such as the 2022 pilot project to reduce sand application, and a service level review set for this summer.
“We could stage this report to kind of have building blocks, if we want to increase the service (and) what that cost looks like, and we can kind of go with that to see where we land,” said Roger Young, the city's general manager of environment and infrastructure services.
“The initial request was just to focus on snow removal … whereas this request includes an analysis of how we can improve service during those extreme weather events.”
Council agreed to Leatherdale and Fallis’ request, with Coun. Ralph Cipolla asking that particular emphasis be given to sidewalks.
"The only complaints I've had this year was not necessarily the roads, but the sidewalks,” Cipolla said. “What people are saying is there's not enough salt on the sidewalks for seniors to walk … so I would like the sidewalks to be a priority (in this) report.”
