City wants new rules to deal with snow

City staff plan to ask aldermen tonight for approval to draft new rules for how residents deal with winter storms.

In a memo to aldermen, Dave Stoneback, director of the city’s Public Works Agency, says that in responding to this season’s storms city workers have discovered the need for new rules that would:

• Prohibit placing leaves in the street.
• Prohibit plowing snow from private property onto public property.
• Prohibit placing snow in the parkway to a height of three feet or deeper within 25 feet of an alley or street intersection.
• Require that property owners clear sidewalks whenever there’s an accumulation of two inches or more of snow. Now shoveling is only legally required after a snowfall of four inches or more.
• Require that property owners clear snow and ice from trash receptacles.

In a related Public Works agenda item, Stoneback Monday will ask aldermen to authorize additional street sweeping days at the end of the fall season.

The new plan calls for having three cleaning days between Nov. 1 and Dec. 15 in all neighborhoods. Now some neighborhoods get two days in that time frame, but others get only one.

The new schedule, though, will require breaking out of the recently-adopted pattern that has street cleaning happen consistently on the same day of the same week each month all year.

The city plans to mail a brochure with the new street cleaning schedule to residents, and Stoneback encourages residents to sign up to receive email or text message reminders for each street-cleaning day.