A snow plan that giveth and taketh away

A new snow plan is on the City Council agenda again tonight. This was first brought up in July, but was deferred because some council members had questions. The current snow plan can be downloaded from the City’s website.

If you look at the current snow route map, you’ll see that there are red routes (primary) and blue routes (secondary). The new plan would, among other things, change all some of the blue routes to red routes; or, to put it another way, it would elevate the status of some secondary routes to primary ones. There are significantly more blue routes in the newer, northern parts of Peoria. So, what this effectively means is that snow removal will be slower in the older parts of town as resources are shifted north.

“What’s wrong with that?” you may ask. It’s less efficient. Efficiency would be clearing the greatest amount of snow for the greatest number of people in the least amount of time. The current primary/secondary route system does that. Promoting all secondary routes to primary ones would decrease efficiency.

How? Because of two things: density and grid streets. There are more homes per acre in the older parts of the city, so naturally plowing a mile there is going to affect more people than plowing a mile in the northern part of the city. And the streets in the older part of the city are laid out in a gridiron pattern, which is also more efficient to plow because it doesn’t require any backtracking. You may recall from the Six Sigma snow study that it takes six times as long to plow a cul-de-sac than a through street.

Fifth-district councilman Pat Nichting’s response to this argument?

“Remember, taxes pay the bills and not density,” Nichting said. [...] “I know Mr. Sandberg wants to focus on density, but does it pay for people’s salary or (generate the taxes) to pay for salary?”

I guess under Nichting’s logic, the primary snow routes should be the streets the rich people live on, and if the poor people aren’t paying enough taxes (in his estimation), then they just shouldn’t get their streets plowed at all. I would point out that while “taxes pay the bills,” property taxes only account for 14% of the city’s revenue. We actually get more revenue from sales taxes, state sources, and other local taxes such as the garbage tax — which, by the way, is a flat fee paid by rich and poor alike. And I might also point out that it was with taxes generated by the older part of Peoria that all that infrastructure in the over-annexed north end was developed — and developed at the expense of maintaining the infrastructure in the older parts of town.

I think Nichting’s longing for oligarchy is not in the best interests of Peoria. An efficient snow removal plan would be better for all. Workers would be able to get to work quicker, which would help the employers/executives, and emergency services would be able to have quicker access to all parts of town. And it should be remembered that everyone’s taxes “pay the bills,” not just those from the fifth district.

UPDATE: Since I don’t get the full council packet, I can only see what is put up on the city’s website. The new snow plan map is in the council’s packet, but not on the website, so the only thing I had to go on was the July 22 council communication and PowerPoint presentation. Based on the wording there that they were recommending to “eliminate ’secondary’ routes,” and subsequent discussion on the council floor that meeting where at-large councilman Gary Sandberg asked if the blue routes were becoming red routes, I was under the impression that applied to all of the “eliminated” blue routes. Sandberg has informed me that it’s only some of those routes.

The point is still that the routes should be based on density, and changes to the route system should be clearly communicated and justified.