Printer-friendly version Reader Comments

January 23, 2008

Portland residents will put down their snow shovels and troop into the City Council chambers tonight to sound off on the city’s snow removal ordinance.

Homeowners and businesses are likely to take conflicting stands on an emergency amendment to the ordinance and offer opinions on how to retool the controversial measure, which makes property owners responsible for clearing their sidewalks within 24 hours of a storm.

“I’d like to see an evaluation of what the important sidewalks are that need to be cleared, because obviously there are safety concerns both on an off the peninsula,” said Frank Turek of Howard Street.

On the agenda tonight is a proposal from the council’s Public Safety Committee to limit enforcement of the ordinance to the peninsula. That means homeowners off the peninsula won’t have to clear their walks within 24 hours of a storm, as the ordinance normally requires.

Commercial property owners will still have to remove snow from sidewalks, regardless of location.

The committee endorsed the emergency amendment earlier this month, after hearing from residents who debated the ordinance. Some said they couldn’t remove the large piles of snow deposited on their walks by city snowplows, or that they had no place to put the snow, especially on the peninsula.

Others said cleared sidewalks were essential to protect the safety of pedestrians, especially children or the elderly who are forced to walk in the streets.

Janet Daigle, of outer Congress Street, plans to urge the council to abandon what she calls the “one size fits all” policy now in place and develop a more flexible approach.

“The message that I’m trying to get across is this: They need to look at this street by street and come up with different categories of importance or priority,” she said.

Daigle sent councilors photos of the sidewalk in front of her home, showing snow piled nearly to the top of the 6-foot fence that borders the walk. The piles were left by city plows that cleared snow from the four lanes of Congress Street in front of her house.

Last year the city sent Daigle and her neighbors legal notices warning that they could be fined for not clearing the walks. Councilors have discussed snow removal in at least six meetings in the last nine months, but the policy has yet to be revised, and the legal threat still hangs over the neighborhood, she said.

“They worked on it all year and totally blew us off,” she said.

Turek, the Howard Street resident, has sharpened the focus on snow removal this winter by creating a Web site where residents can report unshoveled walks. The site, portlandsidewalks.org, provides links to phone numbers and an e-mail account at City Hall for reporting walks that are impassable.

About 45 properties were listed on the site after last week’s storm, but Turek says that’s an improvement since the first snows began falling early in December. So far the city of Portland has billed about 35 property owners for snow removal, after they failed to respond to notices to clear their walks.

City Councilor Jim Cohen said the snow removal ordinance has generated more feedback and debate among his constituents than any other issue. He said the ordinance needs an overhaul, but he has reservations about the emergency amendment proposed by the Public Safety Committee.

“If we’re going to eliminate enforcement off-peninsula, I’d be concerned if certain key sidewalk links would be unpassable if there’s not a substitute city clearing of those sidewalks,” he said. The key links would be major arterials, collector roads and streets near schools, he said.

The city already clears certain major sidewalks, but Cohen said he doesn’t think there’s enough money in the budget to expand that work. Long term, he also questions whether a street-by-street policy is feasible.

“I’d be worried about creating an extremely complicated administrative system,” he said. “Wherever we draw a line, people are going to be upset...