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Allison Stieber submitting comments re: the snow removal ordinance.
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To the Honorable Board:
I’m not able to attend tonight’s hearing because I broke my wrist when I fell on black ice a month ago on my own recently snow-cleared, treated front sidewalk and am still unable to drive due to my injury. Suffice to say, I appreciate the importance of maintaining walkways that are as safe as possible for pedestrian passage, though this didn’t prevent my own mishap.
Alderman Heuston, at the January 15th Legislative Matters Committee Meeting, which I also attended and spoke at, made what I consider the best suggestion of all regarding snow-clearing regulations, that being to phrase the timeline for clearing as “x hours after snow has stopped” rather than to retain the current, confusing 10 a.m/10 p.m. designations, which are also unfair, given their potential to create an impossibly narrow window for people who depend on the unpredictable schedules of hired shovelers, and for others as well. I spent many hours researching the wording of other municipalities’ snow-clearing regulations and found that the overwhelming majority give the timeline in number of hours post-storm, not as a fixed, rigid time of day.
I urge the City to reconsider its ill-advised new snow-clearing regulations, which represent an outlier, among other cities and towns, in terms of both arbitrary timelines and unrealistically narrow timeframes allotted to accomplish the task.
Allison Stieber