In contrast to the aftermath of last week’s storms, the streets were in very good condition (*) this morning. The WSJ mentions that the city “doubled the amount of equipment on main roads to clear the heavy accumulations that continued into the afternoon”, which probably had a lot to do with the success. Well done, Madison Department of Streets and Recycling.

I also noticed this bit in the article:

By this morning, Dreckmann said, Madison’s snow-removal crews will have gone through the additional $625,000 the City Council approved a week ago to cover costs from cleanup efforts earlier this year and this month — and then some.

Each storm costs the city about $300,000, Dreckmann said. The city had originally budgeted a little more than $4.5 million for ice and snow removal this year, he said.

City Comptroller Dean Brasser said the money to pay for snow removal through the end of December will come either from savings in other departments or from the nearly $30 million in the city’s fund balance.

That’s pathetic. Why is money even an issue? We’re not an impoverished third-world country. $300,000 per storm comes out to $1.34 per resident. If there isn’t enough money in the budget to plow the streets properly, raise my taxes. I’ll gladly pay an extra $5 per snowstorm to get four times as many plows out there.

I’m being facetious, but only partly so. Even a huge upgrade in the snow removal budget represents a drop in the bucket compared to the city’s $210 million budget for 2008. (**)

Paul Soglin claims that the city’s traditional concern with providing good basic services is being lost because the city government is too distracted by “politically correct issues”. (***)

While it’s obviously true that basic services are more important than “politically correct issues”, it’s not at all clear that said issues are actually distractions.

If the city council wants to stay up until four o’clock in the morning debating whether George Bush is a really bad president, or whether he is a really bad president who should be impeached, that’s their business. The time they’re wasting is their own, and wasting it doesn’t make it any harder to plow the streets.

Snow removal is a (solved) engineering problem. Make sure you have the money. Make sure the money is being well-spent. Make sure you have the necessary equipment. Hire a traveling salesman with a broken left turn signal, and come up with optimal plowing routes. Get the damn ice off the streets. It’s not that difficult.

If we need to spend a little more money to do it right, we should do so.

(*) Although the Postal Service delivered the mail on time and without any apparent hiccups or constraints, UPS was unable to deliver my Macbook from Middleton, fully three miles away, due to “emergency conditions beyond UPS’s control”.

(**) I’d also be interested in seeing a cost-benefit analysis of the tradeoff between plowing all the city’s streets (yes, even the streets where people live), and preventing some number of fender-benders and other minor automobile damage caused by driving down streets that are still covered in ice several days after a storm. I’m not convinced that the “no bare pavement on residential streets” policy is the cheapest one.

(***) I’m sure it has nothing at all to do with the ex-mayor’s political interest in making the current folks look bad.

Posted by Ben Brothers at 5:45 pm, 12 December 2007 and filed under Madison News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.