City spends well under the snow-clearing norm
The City of Medicine Hat clears snow at a cost well below other mid-sized cities in Alberta, according to a new report presented to council on Tuesday.
However, say local officials, some of those costs in other cities include road maintenance, like pothole repair, where the gap narrows between the Hat and other centres in Alberta.
Overall though, the local municipal works department came in generally under cost of other cities for similar services.
“The conclusion is that we’re performing well, our cost and performance are in good stead,” said general manager Dwight Brown in a presentation to council on Tuesday. “That doesn’t mean we can stop looking at ways to do things better.”
Coun. Robert Dumanowski said snow clearing in particular is a topic he hears a lot about from citizens. An uproar in 2012 led to a major revamp of the service.
With fewer complaints in recent years, he concluded the operations were working well, but he was surprised by the cost comparison.
“I can’t recall how many iterations of studies we’ve done, but I’m absolutely pleasantly surprised,” said Coun. Robert Dumanowski. “I thought we’d be much higher (cost).”
The Alberta Municipal Benchmarking Initiative compared local costs against like-sized cities of Lethbridge and Red Deer, as well as smaller communities of Banff Canmore and Okotoks.
For snow clearing, Medicine Hat spent $1,469 per kilometre of road lane in 2014, compared to Lethbridge, which spent $2,115 in a similar climate. Red Deer’s cost that year was $6,145. In terms of total cost per kilometre of road surface, Medicine Hat’s average in 2014 sat at $11,147, below the average of the six cities of $13,027, and below Red Deer ($13,686), but above Lethbridge ($9,963).
Such studies usually come with footnotes explaining the difficulty of comparing operations in different climates and service standards.
Local officials point to how heavy equipment is depreciated in Lethbridge’s accounting system and how Red Deer assigns its labour costs across departments.
Medicine Hat had 1,125 kilometres of roadway lanes in 2014, compared to Lethbridge (1,571) and Red Deer (1,454).
Specific to potholes, Medicine Hat spent $6,540 per kilometre in the network, below the average of $8,142. Traffic signal spending was half the average, and items like sweeping, linepainting and cleanup, closer to the average.
The sidewalk study includes several years when council mandated the department tackle a backlog of work, but even then the city was 10 per cent below other cities average spending.