Missouri Municipality Creates Stronger Snowplowing Game Plan

Kansas City, Missouri, City Manager Brian Platt met with the snow operations team to evaluate its response to a New Year’s Day snowstorm and to create a more aggressive strategy to plow and salt during snowstorms.

"Through a smarter and more collaborative deployment of our already available resources, we will be able to deploy an additional 50 trucks and 100 drivers for all future snowstorms," said Platt, who spent New Year's Day observing and supporting the team plowing city streets. "We will create a larger, 24-hour plowing operation during storms."

Immediate changes include:

• Increasing the amount of salting during storms
• Adding overnight shifts to residential routes
• Instituting a more aggressive approach to snow removal on residential streets
• Plowing multi-lane arterial streets with multiple trucks working in tandem to make sure the street is fully cleared on the first pass
• Assigning all available employees in solid waste and the water department to snow operations during every snow event
• Suspending trash and recycling during big storms to make those drivers available for snow plowing
• Deploying additional snow removal vehicles throughout snow removal operations
• Improving communication and coordination during snow operations
• Identifying additional municipal fleet vehicles that can be deployed for snow removal

“I thank our Public Works Department and city workforce for its dedicated efforts to treat our roads, bridges, and neighborhoods pre- and post-snowfall,” Mayor Quinton Lucas said. “Still, we have significant work to do to ensure the city more quickly provides the services we’ve promised to our residents, and today we are enacting significant reforms to improve the delivery of these services, including deploying more snow response teams to work round-the-clock to clear our roads and sidewalks, and improving the treatment of residential streets in all neighborhoods so our roads don’t turn into sheets of ice days after the storm is over."

Next steps include buying another mini-plow to clear protected bike lanes, as well as adjusting staffing and maintenance work to support these improvements in snowplowing operations.