The goal is to have all the snow removed from Saskatoon’s streets in 8 weeks, from the when the snowfall ended in early January.   On Thursday, the City amended their latest timeline for completion to March 3rd.

General Manager of Transportation and Construction, Terry Schmidt says they have been utilizing all available equipment to get the work done. The City says they have also been dealing with some equipment breakdowns due to extreme cold weather which means some streets planned for snow removal have had to be rescheduled.

At Council Wednesday, Councillor Bev Dubois asked about the removal of the snow next to the curbs and wondered why the corners weren’t being done.  Schmidt explained that they do in front of homes so there are parking spaces available, but to save money, the corners aren’t done.

City Manager Jeff Jorgenson clarified why some of the neighbourhoods had all their snow removed, but not all the priority streets are done.  He explained that part of the problem for city-wide snow removal is that the priority streets are done at night when they will have less traffic impact and the residential streets are done during the day.  Sometimes the street needs to be closed for the snow to be removed from a priority street. Jorgenson suggests that is why some of the higher traffic roads, like a bus route for instance, aren’t done before the first residential neighbourhoods are cleared of snow.

All priority streets are expected to be complete Saturday (Feb 25) and local street snow removal is 84 per cent complete.

So far, snow crews have graded, picked up and hauled 47,500 tandem truckloads full of snow from priority streets, and another 46,018 tandem truckloads from local streets for a total of 93,518 truckloads to date this winter.

The City won’t know final costs until snow removal operations are fully completed but still expects the total cost to be in the $18-20 million range, in line with estimates.  Jorgenson says there will be a report to Council following a review after the work is done.