Snow removal problems have familiar refrain
By NewsPress Now
The city of St. Joseph sets aside about $5.4 million a year for street maintenance, a figure that includes funding for snow and ice removal when winter weather hits.
Boy, did it hit this month. Drivers encountered plenty of frustration and city street crews experienced their share of headaches when several rounds of snow, high winds and frigid temperatures roared into St. Joseph this month.
In judging the city’s performance during a challenging week, it’s tempting to resort to a sort of confirmation bias that assumes if your street didn’t get plowed then everyone else was in the same snow-covered boat.
This reflects a self-centered view of the world, sort of like saying if you have a full belly then there’s no such thing as hunger in our community. What happens to you might not happen to everyone else. Maybe you lived on the last street that the snowplows reached.
But city officials, when asked by a News-Press NOW reporter, acknowledged some difficulty in getting to secondary routes. They didn’t necessarily blame Mother Nature for producing too much snow. Instead, the culprit seems to be a labor shortage that left the street maintenance department with too few drivers.
“What we’ve gotten done with the short amount of people we have, you know, it’s pretty good,” one city employee said.
This probably comes as little solace to the driver who fishtails and spins his or her wheels when trying to make it out of the driveway to work.
Making matters worse, the situation isn’t going to get better anytime soon. In states with legalized marijuana, employers will have a harder and harder time finding qualified applicants with a CDL. (It’s a safety-sensitive job, so an applicant still has to pass a drug screen).
This means staffing shortages are a fact of life, sort of like harsh winters in the Midwest. Nor is the street department the only entity dealing with this situation. Schools, police departments and hospitals all face the challenge of continuing to provide essential services with shortages of nurses, teachers or law enforcement officers.
Yet the public still expects their kids to get educated, their loved ones to get medical treatment and the police to arrive at the scene. Certainly, snow removal (and the filling of potholes every spring) is a core expectation of the taxpaying public. Trails and City Hall windows are great, but it’s not a stretch to suggest that road conditions and drivability affect more people.
Maybe, at least with the snowplows, it’s time for a stipulation between the public and the street department.
For the public, give the road crews some forbearance and don’t assume that they aren’t working hard. They are.
For the city, don’t be so quick to play the “short-staffing” card. At some point, people become numb to it.
