City questions parking lot snow piles

With winter here and more snowflakes pending, Mayor Paul Brooks asked the council last week if the City of Sundance should continue to assist the county with snow removal from the courthouse parking lot – especially now it has grown in size.

“I don’t want to be hauling away every ounce of snow off that great big parking lot,” he said. “I think the county can haul their own away like we would expect a business to.”

Brooks posed this question to see where the council stands on the matter. The county does not pay for the service, he said.

“Right now, they push all their snow off that great big parking lot into the street and we haul it away,” he said.

“My question is: is it our responsibility to do that? We do not do it for businesses, we do not do it for other people.”

It’s a goodwill gesture from the city, Brooks said, but, “They continue to add on to their parking area and it continues to be a bigger pile of snow for us to haul.”

Brooks asked, should the people of Sundance be responsible for the cost of hauling that snow?

Council Member Randy Stevenson suggested that either the county should take care of its own hauling or it should compensate the city for the work.

In response to a question from Council Member Callie Hilty, Public Works Director Mac Erickson confirmed that there are other entities in town that push snow into the street. However, said Brooks, in most other cases, the amount pushed onto the roads is “within reason”.

The county’s parking lot, on the other hand, adds truckloads to the city’s workload after a big storm, he said.

Also, he said, the county is not beholden to contractors for snow removal like other businesses in town. It has “great big loaders and great big dump trucks” at its disposal.

Stevenson asked if a friendly conversation has been had with the county and suggested this would be a good first step before the city decides to “swing the hammer”. The council agreed this would be the best approach and the mayor agreed to initiate the discussion.