Last week, the City of Peoria issued this press release:
“The City of Peoria incurred expenses of $554,671 in combating and managing the 15″ snow storm and blizzard conditions of February 1 and 2, 2011. Clean-up continued throughout the balance of the week. The majority of expenses, $541,000, were incurred by the Public Works Department, and included payment of $192,000 to private contractors to manage and remove snow in a timely and safe manner. The Illinois Emergency Management Administration will be reviewing these expenses to determine the level of reimbursement to the City.
As a matter of interest, we note that the combination of severe ice and sleet storm of 2-3 inches on November 30, 2006, coupled with the following 13” inches of snow and rapidly dropping temperatures on December 1, onward resulted in total expenses of $290,329. Public Works expenses were $274,000 (numbers rounded).
Public Works Department’s redesigned snow routes and increased pre-event planning, plus the use of private contractors during the February 1 blizzard, resulted in quicker response and clean-up compared to the 2006 storm. However, these two storms were much different from one another in terms of the 2006 pre-snow ice build-up and then dramatic temperature drop.
The Journal Star ran an article with some additional cost breakdowns.
This seems like a good time to remind everyone how city planning and development have contributed to these high costs. A 2007 Six Sigma project report found that “The community has grown over 26 center lane miles in the past seven years [2000-2007] and will be growing another ten center lane miles later this year due to new neighborhoods being developed,” but that, “No consideration has been given for equipment or manpower needed to clear the streets.” In other words, as the City has grown in land mass, not enough attention has been given to the cost of providing City services to these new areas. When the City annexes land or builds new roads, you never hear any discussion about the costs of maintaining and clearing them, or the cost of providing additional police and fire protection.
After the report came out, the City initially increased the number of snow routes from 25 to 26. But due to budget cuts in 2009, the number of snow routes was cut back to 23, and there were some layoffs. According to a 12/11/2009 article in the Journal Star, “The route reductions and job cuts resulted in $222,500 in savings.” One wonders what the net savings have been this winter, given the cost of hiring private contractors, renting additional equipment, and paying overtime to the City’s plow drivers.
I thought the same thing and is it really worth the $500,000 if we were snowed in for one more day or a few more hours. I would like to see what the time difference would have been?
“Equipment rental ran $112,000, Holling said. ”
What the hell? What kind of equipment do you need to rent for a snow removal department?
Mittens? Ipods for the drivers? and THAT WAS THE COST FOR one day, 2 days?
The problematic part is that the number of cars and people has not increased significantly since the 70s. Yet Peoria has, what, probably at least tripled its center lane miles? Why do the same number of cars need that many more miles of road? It’s like serving 3 portions for every meal, and throwing away 2 every time (which, come to think of it, we do in this country too). That excessive expansion effectively triples our land use, maintenance costs, etc., and forces people to drive farther, increasing their mileage and gas usage, without any increase in the number of users. It is sheer wanton waste, but on a massive scale. Is there anything we spend more of the taxpayers’ money on than roads? Certainly not education.
This is why the city was able to remove lanes on Main St. without slowing the traffic. We already have vastly more roads and more parking than we need or can possibly use. Yet we keep building more, and further increasing our costs, for no purpose. The snow removal costs are just a drop in the bucket. Imagine how much the road repair work will cost, after all that snow finishes melting and cracking the concrete. Consider the pollution and erosion caused by all the snow and rain running off those same roads, and the costs of trying to control and mitigate all that runoff, a problem created by poor planning and lack of foresight.
If we took even a tiny fraction of what we spend on our bloated automobile infrastructure, and put it towards alternative means of transportation like pedestrian and bike paths, public transportation, and trains, we would be able to save a lot more in the end, while reducing pollution levels and increasing the health and livability of the city.
For the cost of building one single mile of freeway, Portland built its entire citywide bike infrastructure. One single mile of freeway. The costs of automobile infrastructure are exponentially greater and less efficient than our other available transportation systems. And the roads and parking Peoria has built are not even necessary or useful.
Half the trips that are taken every day in America are within 20 minutes by bicycle. A quarter of them are within 20 minutes walking. What good is a walkable Main Street if you have to drive to get there and park when you do? If anyone has any complaints about the one day costs of clearing the miles of sprawling roads Peoria has built in the last 30 years, remember that it is merely a symptom of the city’s, and its residents’, priorities.
Garth-
Garth: Amen … to your statement ….
” If anyone has any complaints about the one day costs of clearing the miles of sprawling roads Peoria has built in the last 30 years, remember that it is merely a symptom of the city’s, and its residents’, priorities.”
I had an interesting experience one day when I was talking with a driver for a demolition company. We were talking about the roads and why they couldn’t be properly built to last a long time …. The driver’s response was it was all about creating jobs every few years for the workers. His response hit me like a ton of bricks and a lightbulb lit up. Not sure if he was accurate, however, it did put me in mind of other areas with colder temperatures then what we experience who have better roads. I recall story about roads in Canada which are smooth and last for years … the preparation of the roads with a deeper base prevents the freeze-thaw problems we experience …. so perhaps the driver was correct — the roads are a jobs program for building, maintenance and then to have to be plowed.
Regrettably, Perhaps something to ponder…..
Yet we keep building more, and further increasing our costs, for no purpose. The snow removal costs are just a drop in the bucket. Imagine how much the road repair work will cost, after all that snow finishes …
Perhaps it is a jobs program for labor, supplies and equipment?
Someone is getting rich somewhere in the pipeline.
It is a tradeoff. Most European highways are built much thicker and deeper, and thus last much longer. Of course, thinner roads like those we tend to build here are cheaper to build up front, but require a lot more maintenance down the line.
Road building projects tend to be so popular because they receive so many subsidies, and local economies certainly like the injection of capital. It’s sort of like corn – we’d have a lot less of it if the feds didn’t subsidize it, because there’s not enough need for it to convince people to grow it on their own. A lot of federal stimulus funding was targeted at such road projects. Unfortunately, most of them are shortsighted. There seems to have been a tendency to slap up new projects just to get the money before the expiration of the program. Most places, like Peoria, do not need more roads. And for all the money we spend expanding our network of roads, our aging infrastructure is some of the worst in the world. It has been a long time since FDR’s works projects. Our dams and bridges are some of the most egregious examples. The international engineers who responded after Katrina were shocked at the state of the infrastructure in New Orleans. It was the levees failing after the hurricane that caused most of the flooding damage. We keep allowing population and use to expand, while neglecting the aging and obsolete infrastructure that is in place. The US DOT surveys after the last catastrophic bridge collapse found that 25% of our bridges are “structurally deficient or functionally obsolete.” That’s 1 in 4 bridges in this country. Those bridges are not getting any younger.
So we keep spending money on poor roads and obsolete transportation (the automobile), yet our long term infrastructure is falling apart around us, and we are failing to make progress in new areas (e.g., our abandonment of solar energy to the Chinese 30 years ago). The American Society of Civil Engineers estimates that eliminating all existing bridge deficiencies would cost $850 billion over the next 50 years (in 2006 dollars). That’s a lot of jobs, and a lot of necessary long term capital improvement that would still be around in 50 years. We don’t need work to make work, we need intelligent planning. Yet the bailout handed trillions of dollars to financial entities like AIG that build nothing but debt. I’d rather still have a few stable bridges in 50 years, and some new energy sources and transportation options, than still have the debt from the CDO mortgage scheme. Or have a few more miles of crumbling roads that still have to be plowed in winter!
Garth-