Snow Daze

frostbitten: By waiting until four inches of snow falls before plowing, the city expects to save $1 million. Photo By: Michael T. Regan

The mayor's legacy of quickly plowed streets may drift away.

by Brian Hickey

This year's Farmers Almanac warns that the Northeast will suffer through a snow-coated December, with dreams of a white Christmas likely coming true. The city's resident weather geek, NBC-10's Glenn "Hurricane" Schwartz, predicts there will be an extra half-foot of the white stuff than average on the ground in Philadelphia before spring arrives.

In other words, it's probably not the best of times for the city to scale back the improved snow-removal services that Mayor John Street considers among his biggest accomplishments. But two weeks ago, when Street issued a statement to address the impending downsizing of city government, he announced that his plans wouldn't stop with pink slips.

"I cannot guarantee there will be no slippage in some of the services residents receive and have come to expect," he said, referring to some painful cuts needed to balance the $3.4 billion budget, including 500 layoffs and another 800 jobs eliminated through attrition. "I am not at all confident that we can continue the aggressive snow-removing measures that have been a hallmark of this administration."

A week later, Street reiterated the point when he told reporters to "pray that we don't have a $5 million snowstorm. If we do have snow, pray that it comes on Friday afternoon and gets really, really warm on Saturday."

Translated: Get ready for a long, homebound winter.

When Street ran for re-election against Sam Katz, neither candidate hid the fact that the city would be facing some fiscal woes in the upcoming years. But what makes Street's recent declarations sting is the fact that he's long boasted—even during that campaign—of snow removal as a symbol of his commitment to residents.

Quite frankly, he had every right to do so.

After being elected to a first term, Street corralled the city's media corps to show them plows working side streets that rarely—if ever—got cleared before. Making the roads passable, the Inquirer quoted Street as saying, is the government's "responsibility."

"People don't want to hear "We can't do this. Go get your shovel,'" he continued, according to the paper.

Before that photo-op, Street pulled $200,000 from city coffers to turn eight pickup trucks into makeshift plows versatile enough to fit on narrow city streets. That investment was a mere flurry of green compared to the city's overall snow-removal expense. Though it only drained $1.5 million from the city budget in 2001-02, the bill more than quadrupled the following winter as the city remained dedicated to plowing as much of Philadelphia roadways as possible. Managing Director Phil Goldsmith says an average winter with 10 snow "events" runs the city about $3.3 million.

Street was so successful that, by the time the 2003 campaign season started, voters in a poll ranked snow removal and the Neighborhood Transformation Initiative equally when it came to his biggest accomplishments. He didn't neglect that good will when it came time for re-election.

"If I've had one person, I've had 100 people tell me, "I'm voting for you because I saw a snow plow on my block for the first time in 50 years,'" Street told a City Paper editorial board three weeks before Election Day last year.

"We have 2,340 miles of streets in this city," Street said. "When I became mayor, we only had a plan to plow 900 miles. In that most recent snow, we put a snow plow on almost every single block of this city because we revised the way we plow snow. In our case, we were so ready for the snow because I made that commitment."

Calls to Street's spokespeople this week for comment on how these cuts would affect his legacy were bounced to Goldsmith, who said the city's current budgetary woes made the rollback unavoidable. He noted that there will be snow removal, but the plows won't go out onto the streets until there are at least 4 inches on the ground. That, he said, is a long-standing city policy which had been de-emphasized by a Street administration that opted to send the trucks out even earlier to help residents dig out. Waiting until it accumulates to that level, Goldsmith says, will save the city $1 million which, when coupled with their move to save money by combining salt with crushed cinders, marks a real savings.

"This pains us because we take great pride in clearing residential and tertiary streets," he says. "We're not ready to throw in the towel, but given our need to reduce costs and get the budget under control, we're just saying that we may have to be less aggressive than in the past. We just want to start to set that expectation in the public."

However, Brett Mandel of city tax-reform advocacy group Philadelphia Forward says the snow-removal issue can be viewed two ways. From one perspective, Mandel senses a ploy that may disappear as quickly as a coating of ice once the defroster's turned on.

"Since they don't want to make tax reform a priority, what we get are scare tactics," Mandel says. "They're saying, "If we reform taxes, we can't deal with the snow,' or that puppies will be kicked across Broad Street because we had to scale back the Anti-Puppy-Kicking Squad. If it's summer, they say we can't open the pools. If it's winter, no snow removal."

On the other hand, Mandel maintains the city has so unwisely spent—and borrowed—money in recent years that something finally had to give.

"The city is not in a budget crisis, it's in a spending crisis," Mandel says, noting that snow removal is taking a hit because the money set aside to fund it was used elsewhere. "They just spend and spend instead of figuring out how to fix the system. Could they have seen this coming? Absolutely."