The City of Aurora might begin plowing snow from residential streets, as City Council members begin weighing options.
That's something it doesn't do now and doesn't allow metro districts or homeowners associations within city limits to plow either.
Councilmembers said the need for neighborhood snow removal has been a concern raised by constituents for years.
Aurora’s Director of Public Works Cindy Colip and Deputy Director of Public Works operations Lynne Center Monday briefed the council on the potential ways Aurora could address the issue.
The city’s goal is to make sure it can maintain emergency services at all times during snow events, Center said.
The city’s snow and ice management plan prioritizes clearing city streets in this order: arterial streets, collector streets and roads to schools and hospitals, streets that go through a neighborhood but connect to a collector, and then the main north/south and east/west connector streets in east Aurora.
“We do not prioritize residential streets for snowplowing,” Center said.
In all, that plan comprises just over 1,500 lane miles. For the 2021-22 season, the total cost for snow and ice removal was more than $2.3 million — or about $5.85 per resident.
Staffing has been a challenge this year, Center said, an issue affecting multiple city departments. There is a roughly 40% vacancy rate in street operations, as well as vacancies in critical positions. The city’s street operations manager role has been vacant for more than a year.
Aurora also experienced unusual weather in recent months. Typically, storms are followed by a warmup and snow melts to a passable level before city resources would be able to deploy to residential streets, Center said.
In December, a cold snap fell across the area and temperatures stayed frigid through early February, Center said. The city also experienced snowstorms every few days that brought between two and six inches of snow.
“This is a really rare occasion for us to have this,” she said.
The city has researched multiple options to begin residential snow removal since the transportation policy committee asked city staff to look into the matter following a blizzard in March 2021 and the 2019 bomb cyclone.
As part of those efforts, the city launched a pilot program that was approved in January 2021 and wrapped up in June of last year.
Under the program, the High Plains Metro District, which services the Blackstone neighborhood, and Aurora entered into an inter-governmental agreement allowing the district to handle snow removal for residential streets in its boundaries.
That agreement stipulated that the district would develop a snow removal plan reviewed by the city, use equipment approved by the city, provide services at the same level Aurora would, and submit daily logs during a weather event.
The city also wanted to do an assessment both before and after the winter season to monitor any damages done to the local infrastructure.
The agreement covered 18 lane miles. The district planned to deploy equipment if at least six inches of snow accumulated, or in response to a Category 3 storm. The district did not deploy during the pilot period, Colip said.
The number of storms that prompt the need for private plowing has historically been infrequent, Colip said, who echoed Center in adding that most storms melt quickly.
If the city began allowing metro districts and homeowners associations to plow residential streets, Aurora would likely need additional full-time staff, she said. There have also been concerns about the equitability of using this option, she said.
Staff recommended implementing a licensing or permitting program instead of using inter-governmental agreements with districts and HOAs if the city choose to allow them to begin managing removal, Colip said. Standing up that program would likely take a year to develop, she said.
The next steps to going that route would be recruiting the street operations manager, hiring a senior project manager, developing a permit program, and compiling a list of metro districts and HOAs interested in participating, she said.
City staff have also analyzed the cost of handling residential snow removal in-house.
The cost of Aurora implementing an in-house residential snow removal program would include $1.5 million in annual expenses and one-times costs of nearly $1.7 million. There are 862 miles of residential lanes, and the city would need 18 operators to clear residential streets in a shift. One vehicle can handle 50 miles in a 12-hour shift, Colip said.
In comparing the cost of using city staff versus relying on contractors, the most cost-effective option depends on how much snow the city gets, Colip said.
For one deployment, the cost for the city to do residential snow removal would be $126,068, while contracting the work out would be $63,720. But if the city needed to deploy at least three times, it becomes more cost-effective to handle snow removal in-house. The cost to the city for three deployments would be $166,704 while contracting the work would ring up at $191,160, Colip said.
Councilmember Alison Coombs suggested starting a residential program by using contractors, evaluating how often it seems the city will need to deploy, and decide to bring the program in-house if it appears Aurora will routinely need to deploy three times or more.
Colip had some reservations about residential street plowing.
“If residential streets are plowed ahead of time, before the roadway network has been made passable, that could cause some real severe situations,” Colip said.
It could lead to accidents, or people getting stuck, and create more issues for emergency services, she said. There’s also a higher likelihood of property damage when an operator takes a blade through residential streets, she said.
To avoid blocking in cars parked on the street or driveways, she would also recommend the city haul away snow cleared from residential streets, which adds another expense to the program, she said.
Councilmember Francoise Bergan, who was one of the councilmembers pushing for staff to research residential snow removal in recent years, urged public works to quickly develop the permit program.
She also wants any funds budgeted for snow removal that are not used to begin rolling over and funneling into a dedicated contingency fund, she said. Coombs and Councilmember Dustin Zvonek voiced support for that idea.
Zvonek cautioned against relying on historical weather trends in planning future snow removal programs and said the need for residential plowing was greater this year.
“I think it’s fair to say that climate change has made the weather patterns much less predictable,” he said.
