Medicine Hat snow removal budget on target with about $700K spent so far

The snow removal budget from the city runs from the start of January to the end of December.

Maunder said that the budget is divvied up into staff wages, equipment usage, contracted services, and materials.

“We’re actually in the first half of our 2025 budget. The total budget for snow and ice control on an annual basis is about $1.7 million dollars,” Maunder said.

“Right now, if you split that kind of generally in half, you’re kind of about 0.8, 0.9 million for the first half, and so we’re sitting kind of about 0.7 million expended so far.”

Maunder said on average, they city typically see more snow and ice control activities in the first three to four months, versus the last couple months of the year.

The road networks are split into three categories.

“Category one are the arterials, your main roads, your hills around the hospital. Those are generally receiving, plowing and sanding as well, so that traction control,” Mauder said.

“Our Category two can be a mix between that plowing. That’s your typical, that’d be your bus routes around school zones, some of your collector roads, the downtown. Those may receive plowing, but typically that’s a sanding activity to make sure everybody’s got that traction for their vehicles,” he added.

“Then we jump into the Category three, which are the residential local roads. And we’ll go address those basically once we’re completed those other two categories, we’ll go deal with residential roads to make sure that they’ve got passability for the public.”

Maunder said that category three roads will generally not be plowed unless they are running into really big specific issues.

“Whether it’s a drainage issue, or some significant rutting that’s causing a lot of issues in that particular place,” Maunder said.

“For the most part, any snow removal, we actually pull it off the roads, those are done on specific roads that we know are causing issues, and they’re typically more in that Category 2 type of range there.”

Maunder said there would be lots of challenges to plowing the category three roads.

“The budget would definitely be one of those challenges,” Maunder said.

“The other parts of that is if we were not to actually remove it from the roadway, there’s loss of parking, challenges with having to climb over windrows to get to homes and stuff like that,” he added.

“Medicine Hat’s got the wonderful Chinooks, so having it spread out across the road actually is a good thing, it melts faster, it generally doesn’t cause the same issues, whereas if you have windrows, you change the way drainage works, and there’s a lot of challenges to plowing within residential roadways.”

Maunder said crews will be out depending on what they’re facing.

“Through the winter we do have an early shift that gets out there and makes sure that we’re tackling the roads with sand and get that trash material out,” Maunder said.

“They’ll call in additional resources if we’re finding that we’re in an immediate snow event,” he said.

“It gets us out onto the main roads before the public gets out there, so that’s why we have that early morning shift, but generally we’re working normal standard hours, but then we definitely will run all our equipment and all our staff as much as we can to make sure that we’re getting the roads in a good winter driving conditions.”

Maunder said there trying to make sure that the roads are in as best as possible road winter driving conditions.

“Do give the operators the room so that way they can do what they need to do to make sure you get to work and home as safe as you can,” Maunder said.

“We do have a couple areas where we provide free traction material to the public, they can go to the several bins around the city and they can grab that so they make sure their sidewalks and driveways and stuff are safe for them and the pedestrians that go by their houses.”

by Jesse Gill

Medicine Hat snow removal budget on target with about $700K spent so far

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