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.

What will the City Council be considering Tuesday night? Well, I thought you’d never ask. Here are the highlights:

• First off, at-large councilman George Jacob will be attending the meeting via teleconference. Do you ever wonder what the person is doing while teleconferencing in to the meeting? Eating dinner, perhaps? Or watching the Olympics? All of a sudden, we hear him shout “GO USA!” because he forgot to hit the mute button…. Okay, maybe I’m the only one who wonders those things.
• The City is looking to get an electronic storage system for documents and images. By storing scans of documents and pictures in a centralized database, the City can be more efficient both in terms of physical space and retrieval time. One example given in the council communication is building plans. “Planning, Public Works, Inspections and Fire all receive building plans and each department is storing those plans independently. With this system, the plans can be scanned or saved if in electronic format and shared by all departments rather than each saving the large files and taking up additional space for either disk storage or the paper copies.” Sounds like a good idea. Cost: $81,000. Vendor: Advanced Processing and Imaging, Inc.
• The City is poised to spend $122,446.20 on a .22-mile bike trail extension with its own storm sewer system along Hickory Grove Rd. This is a curious expense. It’s at 100% city expense. The storm sewer portion will correct a drainage problem that has resulted in some flooding of residential backyards. Can someone tell me when the longstanding drainage issues in the fourth district got corrected that would have moved this fifth-district project up on the priority list?
• New sidewalks will be constructed around Manual High School. This was in response to Manual students walking in the middle of the road, obstructing traffic, ostensibly because sidewalks were in disrepair or nonexistent. What do you think? Will the construction of these sidewalk improvements keep the kids out of the street?
• It’s been two years since the City’s 20-year cable franchise agreement with (then) Insight Communications expired. Since then, there have been little extensions of a few months at a time while a new franchise agreement is negotiated. There will be another one of those extensions Tuesday night, this time until June 2009. Maybe someday they’ll actually come to terms on a new franchise agreement.
• The City will raise cab fares to a realistic level.
• The City has a chance to put a stop to the proposed three-story office building for Riverfront Village (you know, the big concrete slab on stilts that blocks the view of the river downtown). When the City approved the development back in March 2007, it had a deadline that construction would commence by December 2008. Well, that’s not going to happen, so now the developer wants to extend the deadline to December 2010. The council should be working toward eventually getting that monstrosity torn down, not adding to it. A three-story office building will only exacerbate the problem. This is the perfect opportunity to kill it.
• There’s a request for the Council to approve a resolution asking the state to raise our taxes supporting the City of Chicago’s bid to host the 2016 Olympics.
• There’s a request to put an electronic billboard at the intersection of I-74 and Knoxville Ave. The Zoning Commission recommended denial. It will be interesting to see if second-district councilmember Barbara Van Auken goes with the Zoning Commission’s advice, or if she votes to approve it anyway.

There’s one more item — the snow plan — but I’ll be looking at that in a separate post, coming up next.