The City of Greater Sudbury has been cleared to hire three additional seasonal sidewalk plow operators.
Last week’s city council meeting ratified the Sept. 18 operations committee decision, and greenlit the one-year pilot project slated to improve sidewalk conditions this winter season.
“We restrained ourselves from cheering,” Safer Sidewalks Sudbury founder Maria Bozzo told Sudbury.com this week, of the Sept. 18 meeting.
A group of sidewalk advocates attended the meeting to show their support for improved winter sidewalk maintenance, and were enthused to see the operations committee of city council give it unanimous support.
It’s particularly important that the pilot program will affect the entire municipality, Bozzo said.
“We really made a concerted effort not to focus on any particular area, because we feel that sidewalks are universal across the city and we want to see them all improved.”
Downtown winter sidewalk maintenance is important, she said, but people need to be able to get there in the first place, and if sidewalks aren’t cleared to bus stops, some people can’t travel.
The pilot project is budgeted to cost $277,000 between 2023-24. The three sidewalk plow operators it pays for will be added to the city’s current complement of 21. In addition to wages, a portion of funds allocated to the pilot project will go toward such things as equipment and material costs.
The three new operators will be mandated with clearing sidewalks continually, and will follow existing crews after snow events to plow and sand any sidewalk routes left unfinished, resolving such issues as snow blocking sidewalks.
In addition to the three new operators, the city plans on establishing a dedicated pool of temporary casual employees to supplement existing crews, in part to help ensure sidewalks are maintained on weekends.
Between these efforts, city operations engineer Tony De Silva told the city’s elected officials, “It’s definitely going to provide an extra level of maintenance throughout the city we wouldn’t have had before.”
During last month’s meeting, Ward 12 Coun. Jocelyne Landry-Altmann indicated that this pilot project might be the first in a series, with a future effort to address a request for winter sidewalk maintenance improvements in Greater Sudbury downtowns outside of Sudbury’s core.
Ward 8 Coun. Al Sizer has been championing winter sidewalk maintenance for years, and only recently achieved city council approval for the pilot project, Bozzo said, noting that her group will be keeping an eye on this project before pushing for additional changes.
“We’re hopeful that this works out and can become a permanent change,” she said, adding that she encourages people to continue calling the city’s customer service line, 311, with complaints as they arise. She also hopes the city undertakes a public consultation process with sidewalk users to help determine the pilot project’s effectiveness.
Not only might the pilot project require some fine-tuning, but Bozzo said other issues will persist.
“The pilot didn’t address all of the issues we raised,” she said. “For instance, the street plows knocking the snowbank into the sidewalk. Those kinds of things still need to be called in.”
During last week’s city council meeting, the city’s elected officials also ratified a Sept. 18 operations committee meeting decision to lower the daily traffic threshold for traffic calming infrastructure (such as speed bumps) from 900 vehicles per day to 500, and to better prioritize roads that are part of cycling routes.
Tyler Clarke covers city hall and political affairs for Sudbury.com.
