13-Year-Old Issues Wake Up Call

Hey, look! Skating at a city park! In Madison.... :-(

If you missed it in this week's Herald, 13-year-old Monona resident Taylor Hamm nailed it with his question 'why can't we skate on the lagoon?' He's not the first to ask. A couple weeks ago, Matt Marks, a long-time Monona resident and advocate for our parks called and asked why the city hadn't cleared the snow from the lagoon.

I looked into it and found that the temperature had not been above freezing from January 27 to February 18 and was below zero for a good number of days. I inquired of staff (as did Alders Kugle and McKeever and maybe others) 'why wasn't the snow cleared?' I got a long answer explaining why they can't do it rather than any attempt to find a solution. The abbreviated answer is that the city uses a 1200-pound piece of machinery to plow the snow. In the past, staff using this machine broke through the ice. As a result, staff instituted a rule that the ice has to be 12" thick before they will clear the ice. The ice wasn't 12" thick, so they have not cleared it.

My response to city management: this is not good enough. We won't get 12" thick ice very often, so we need to find other ways to clear the ice that do not require 12" ice. (I do not, by the way, question the Public Works crew's desire to clear the snow off the ice.) And I'm not really disputing whether 12" is excessive (but see below); I'm just saying, 'fine, then find another way to do it'.

The city has gone more and more toward mechanizing public works operations and the 1200-pound plow is part of that - in part as a response to the reduction in PW staff. Mechanization is fine when it works, but it's not working in this case. Under the mayor's budget the PW crew was reduced by one worker in 2006. I opposed that move but lost.

Alder McKeever found some interesting material from the Army Corp of Engineers. Click here: Ice Thickness and Strength for Various Loads According to the Army Corps of Engineers, 7" of ice will hold a single passenger vehicle, 8" will hold a 2.5 ton truck. At 12" the ice will hold a 5- to 7-ton truck. Minnesota DNR has more stringent guidelines (see chart). But, really it's not our job as alders to decide how thick the ice has to be to plow it with a 1200-pound plow.

We have a two-fold problem. One, we don't have enough people in the PW crew to do the work that needs to be done. Two, we do not have leadership in managment that is able or willing to find a solution. Frankly, it's embarrassing.