During the City Council meeting on Monday, January 5th, the current snow removal ordinance received discussion. Councilman Mark Crisp requested that the council discuss the current ordinance. The current ordinance, which was adopted on October 17, 2011, and made effective on November 16, 2011, states that when a snow alert is declared for the City of Dell Rapids, there is no parking on either side of the street for the duration of the snow alert.
Crisp said, “Why was this ever changed? I just don’t know the purpose of it. When you are out ticketing cars right after the snow plows start plowing, you’re taking law enforcement that might be attending accidents and having them write tickets. You’re forcing people who live primarily in the interior part of town where they don’t necessarily have garages or off street parking to have to skip work to dig their car out after a bad storm. Where are they going to dig their car out and put it? The streets haven’t been plowed yet….I don’t see why we tried to fix something that isn’t broken.”
Crisp then brought up to the council that the old snow ordinance was still able to be found on the city’s website. City Administrator Justin Weiland noted that if the old ordinance was still on the website, that needed to be removed.
When Crisp asked why was the ordinance changed, Mayor Scott Fiegen said, “People were unclear about when’s 24 hours from when? When are you going to actually clear the streets? By doing the alert, which I love, it says okay, the snow’s going to quit. I got the text alert today. It says at 4:00 a.m. these guys are going to start plowing. Make sure your car is off the street.”
Weiland also said, “We didn’t come at this decision lightly when we went through this. There was input from the public works, input from city attorney, input from all the council, there were many, many different ordinances reviewed.”
Councilman Lee Burggraff asked Crisp what he would like to see done. Crisp responded that he would like to have the ordinance put back the way it was prior to the 2011 snow removal ordinance change.
Councilman David Sommerfeld added, “This ordinance was put in place for something to make it nice for everybody….Another reason we talked it over very carefully (is because) it’s dangerous for our employees to swing in and out of these streets when they are trying to plow the streets, especially when there are cars on both sides of the street.”
No action was taken during the council meeting and the current snow removal ordinance will remain as is. The old ordinance has since been removed from the city’s website.
