SASKATOON – Ask anyone about the city’s snow removal operations and current level of service and everyone’s got an opinion.
City officials say they get numerous complaints every year, but the impact has been greater this year due to greater snowfall amounts.
The city says just one storm can cost up to $1.5 million to clean up.
City officials provided a rough breakdown of this year’s $8 million snow removal budget where around 90-thousand man hours is spread over five to five-and-a-half months.
The biggest expense after a snowfall is $3 million in labour including overtime.
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Approximately $1.4 million is allocated for equipment costs and another million goes towards contract snow clearing services.
Nine hundred thousand dollars covers private services such as snow dump pushing, load-out hauling, school zone load-out and trucking.
Half-a-million dollars is spent on sand and salt products and $300,000 on fuel.
Lastly, around $480,000 is set aside to pay for overages.
According to Infrastructure Services Manager Mike Gutek, we will likely have to dip into our stabilization reserve already to cover the cost of snow removal in 2012, since the amount of snow Saskatoon had received has exceeded expectations.
The fact of the matter depends on whether or not taxpayers are willing to pay for it.
“It all comes down to choices, what level of service do we want, what response time do we want, anybody whose in the equipment business- it looks easy, everybody job looks easy until you do it, it takes a tremendous amount of coordination, tremendous amount of horsepower and everyone’s expectations is for a quick response time and that takes a lot of cash to make things happen,” said Gutek.
Saskatoon balances its snow removal program with private contractors, whereas other cities have found going 100 per cent private is more cost effective.
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