The Marchand administration is considering extending snow scraping and removal deadlines to save money and avoid turning to the private sector for other costly operations.
The heads of snow clearing teams in Quebec City presented their recommendations for making snow removal operations more efficient to elected officials on Wednesday.
Their proposals come as snow removal expenses are on the rise. Costs for clearing snow in Quebec City went from $74.4 million in 2020 to $104.5 million in 2023 — a 30 per cent increase.
One of the ideas they suggested to cut costs is reviewing snow clearing deadlines.
They said by increasing the time for clearing residential roadways from four to six hours, the city believes it will be able to carry out the same work with about 50 routes rather than the 80 routes currently required.
Those freed-up vehicles could be reassigned to street cleaning — a job that is currently outsourced to the private sector. Martin Forgues, the division chief of planning and support, believes it would be possible for the city to clean up to four million square metres of roadway.
Forgues estimates the city would save $12 million. But costs related to overtime for blue-collar workers and the use of more salt and abrasives would have to be subtracted from that amount.
“These are not peccadilloes, these are pretty large amounts, large areas,” Forgues said. [The goal is to] create enough wiggle room with our current resources to take over managing some areas entirely without necessarily returning them to the market for invitations to tender.”
Mobilizing resources
Forgues and his colleagues noted that crews concentrate their efforts during the first and sometimes second night after snowfall.
Those operations require deploying a large number of machines, such as snowblowers, trucks and graders and storing them.
“After that, we park these resources in the garage and then wait for it to snow again to reuse them,” said Forgues, who is in favour of a step-by-step approach. “It’s expensive to need all of this, concentrated in a very short time.”
By spreading snow removal operations over more nights, the city would use fewer machines more efficiently, he said.
The borough of Sainte-Foy–Sillery–Cap-Rouge is responsible for snow removal operations in Quebec City.
Citing a recent report from the auditor general, borough director Marie-Pierre Raymond noted that the trigger criteria (amount of snowfall in centimetres) and the deadlines for snow removal operations were, in general, more rigorous in Quebec City than in most other cities.
The municipality therefore has the necessary leeway to explore changes to its criteria and deadlines, he said.
Storms, not the norm
Raymond and Forgues say they are in favour of deploying machines suited for regular winter conditions rather than storms.
They underlined that 30 centimetres of snowfall is an exceptional amount for Quebec City.
According to them, the city would be better off equipping itself with the human and material resources to provide an excellent level of service during precipitation of 10 to 15 centimetres of snow, which is much more frequent.
“We can’t hire hundreds of additional blue-collar workers and train them for the six abnormal snowfalls we have during the winter,” she said.
Quebec City Mayor Bruno Marchand did not comment on the proposals from the teams responsible for snow removal.