Town Council will review the current ice and snow policy at budget discussions this fall.
The discussion will centre around whether or not to lower the trigger and add additional plouws for D Routes.
At the council meeting on Monday, John Watson, operations manager with the Town, said lowering the trigger for a full residential plouw to 40 cm will see D Routes plowed an additional two to three times per winter.
“To plow the D Routes it costs roughly $74,000 each time,” Watson said.
Watson added that Council has approved a seasonal trigger, as ordered by the operational manager. The addition of this seasonal trigger will allow for an additional plow of residential streets as the discretion of the operations manager.
Sylvan Lake typically receives about 125 cm of snow each winter season, but this total does not take melt into consideration.
Watson says with snow melt the 125 cm over the course of the winter ends up being closer to 80 cm.
This means D Routes are generally plowed once per year.
“I have had residents say they didn’t have their street plowed this year, which is wrong because we know every street was plowed at least once,” said Watson.
Following the winter season, the Town asked residents to take part in a survey about the snow and ice control policy.
There were 85 respondents, 14 were through the Home and Lifestyle Show in May and the other 71 were done online.
Roughly 53 per cent of those who took part in the survey said they were either satisfied or very satisfied with the current policy.
The top comment from those surveys was the wish to see D routes plowed more, with 24 comments of this nature made.
Watson commented the survey may not be a “statistical representation of Sylvan Lake residents” but did show there are concerns with particular areas.
Council agreed to review the topic during budget deliberations in the fall to further weigh the potential cost to the Town and residents for an increase in D Route plowing.