The biggest snowstorm of this year prevented many college employees from getting to work Monday.
Two city trucks plowed the trunk line roads — M-99 and a couple other major roads — on Sunday, while the full fleet hit the streets Monday morning at 3 a.m.
“We don’t believe in chasing the storm,” Director of Public Services Keith Richard said. “Rather, we let it subside.”
City employees must be paid double time and a half to work on Sundays and holidays. Because the street crew knew the storm was coming, they planned to get to work early Monday morning. It just so happened, Richard said, that the storm stopped at about the same time.
On Sunday, the police department dispatched the public services on-call person, who rotates week-to-week. That employee surveyed the situation and directed a small crew to do initial clearing on the main roads.
On Monday, the fleet of four trucks plowed up and down the three miles of trunk line roads. Then, they plow the 19 miles of major roads followed by the 25 miles of local roads.
“The city plows snow based on a priority level of traffic volume. Because the state trunk lines are most heavily traveled, they are plowed first and most frequently. Accordingly, major streets are plowed second and the local streets third,” the city’s website reads.
A separate fleet of three plow trucks worked on the downtown area, which includes the downtown streets and city-owned parking lots. Afterward, they branched out to dead-end streets and those that are more difficult for the bigger trucks to plow.
Richard estimated that the crew worked for 15 hours on Monday to clear the roads, and that everything was plowed by noon Monday.
However, many citizens said they believed the city’s delay in plowing to be dissatisfactory.
“I found the conditions on larger streets, such as Broad Street, to be very poor on Sunday too. There was some plowing, but it was not enough,” Assistant Professor of Politics John Grant said. “In general, I think the city government is not as interested as it should be in basic functions such as snow plowing and road repair.”
On Tuesday, more cleanup occurred and the city minimized piles of snow in the downtown area.
The city is not responsible for plowing Hillsdale’s county roads, but Teacher of Music Debbi Wyse said the county cleared her road in a timely manner.
“Gravel roads are usually low priority, and are plowed after all hard surface roads have been cleared. Our road was plowed Monday at 1:30 p.m. I was unable to get to work that day because we usually wait until the road crews have passed, piling up the snow in our driveway, then my husband, Ned, goes out with his tractor and loader to clear everything,” she said in an email. “The county crew really did an admirable job on our road this time, even sanding a little.”