Mayors Grow Attuned to the Politics of Snow Removal

Mayors Grow Attuned to the Politics of Snow Removal
By SEWELL CHAN and LIZ ROBBINS
Copyright by The New York Times
Published: February 10, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/11/us/11district.html?hpw


WASHINGTON — Mayor Adrian M. Fenty, whose city has been overwhelmed by record snowfall, knows the clock is ticking. While residents have been relatively understanding — so far — about delays in plowing roads and clearing sidewalks, he recognizes the perils for politicians who do not get their cities cleaned up quickly.

“Snow will test people’s patience,” the mayor, who faces a tough re-election fight in November, said in a telephone interview Wednesday. “A government official who’s in tune with his residents knows that you’ve got to move fast.”

One of his predecessors, Marion S. Barry, was criticized for attending the Super Bowl while a storm buried the capital in January 1987. After flying over the paralyzed city in a helicopter, Mr. Barry defended his leadership by saying, “We’re not a snow town.”

Other mayors have even been turned out of office for their dithering response to severe weather, including Michael A. Bilandic, who lost his job in Chicago after a January 1979 blizzard became a symbol of ineptitude, and William H. McNichols Jr. in Denver, ousted four months after a Christmas Eve storm in 1982.

Mr. Fenty has been criticized for trying to keep city offices and schools open after two feet of snow fell over the weekend. As a second storm headed for the city on Tuesday, he finally gave in.

“He was hellbent on having the government and the schools open, but enough e-mails went through to stop him,” said Sandra Seegars, 59, a community activist in the Congress Heights section of Southeast Washington, one of the city’s poorest neighborhoods.

Ms. Seegars said the second storm — which brought the total snowfall this winter to 54 inches, breaking the record set in 1898-99 — might actually have worked to Mr. Fenty’s advantage.

“My neighbors now aren’t blaming him anymore, just the weather,” she acknowledged.

The new storm obliterated the halting progress that had been made on cleaning up from the earlier one. Major roads into the District had barely been cleared; just blocks from the White House, streets and sidewalks were impassable four days later. Nearly 750 workers, including some pulled from office duties, operated snowplows to tackle the latest snowfall. The city reacted quickly to replenish its inventory of salt, arranging for 3,000 tons that arrived in Baltimore by ship to be trucked to the capital.

Mr. Fenty said Washington had far exceeded its $6.2 million budget for winter snow removal, a sum that had not been depleted in previous years.

“Any city would be severely challenged by this type of deluge,” said Jim Graham, a City Council member who leads the committee overseeing public works. “That said, I think we could have done a whole lot better.”

Mr. Graham said of Mr. Fenty: “People don’t doubt his efforts, but they’re angry. They’re not pleased with the side streets, or with the main streets. But I haven’t spoken to anybody who’s said the type of thing that was being said about Marion Barry in 1987.”

Councilwoman Mary M. Cheh, who represents the most affluent of the city’s eight wards, said her constituents’ main complaint was the erratic plowing.

“Some streets have been plowed over and over again while people in adjoining areas have been waving their arms, pleading, ‘Please bring the plows here,’ ” she said.

Anthony J. Hood, 46, president of the Woodridge Civic Association in Northeast Washington, understood the difficulties.

“We’re not like Michigan or Chicago,” he said Wednesday. “We’re not adapted to it.”

He added, “If it happened more frequently, we would find some kind of way to deal with it.”

Other Washingtonians were less forgiving.

“It was inappropriate to force nonessential governmental employees to work, given that there was no above-ground Metro and limited buses operating,” said Russell A. Smith, 56, who works for Chartered Health Plan, a city contractor, and said he would rate the city’s response a D.

And Ms. Cheh, the councilwoman, said the initial insistence on keeping offices open reflected “arrogance and maybe a little bit of immaturity” on the part of Mr. Fenty, 39.

“It just reinforces an impression that has been settling in anyway,” she said.

Mr. Fenty has compared notes with Baltimore’s new mayor, Stephanie C. Rawlings-Blake. In a phone interview, she said they had exchanged text messages with updates on emergency plans — as well as encouragement. Mayor Fenty’s most recent text? “He said, ‘Get back to work,’ ” she said with a laugh.

Ms. Rawlings-Blake, whose predecessor resigned after a corruption conviction, took office last Thursday, the eve of the first storm. On Wednesday, she ordered the city’s streets closed to all but emergency vehicles.

“This morning, the National Weather Service advised of life-threatening blizzard conditions, so we had to pull our trucks to the side of the road,” she said. “I want to get the city streets clear, but I’m not going to risk safety of our employees just to get an A grade on snow removal.”

Ms. Rawlings-Blake defended the city’s snow-removal operation, which has been so overloaded that trucks have been dumping tons of plowed-up snow into the Inner Harbor.

Baltimore’s snow broke a 1995-96 record.

Ms. Rawlings-Blake said Maryland’s governor, Martin O’Malley, had called the situation “a trial by blizzard,” and added that she agreed.

Mr. O’Malley, for his part, sounded a bit exasperated with residents who complained about the quality of the plowing. Officials were focused, he told reporters, on clearing the way for Humvees and ambulances to get into neighborhoods for emergency purposes. “So stop already with the ‘Scrape my street down to the pavement,’ ” he said. “That cannot happen for the next 72 hours.”

Mr. Fenty appeared to take a measure of comfort in the fact that the District’s adjacent suburbs in Maryland and Virginia have been equally crippled by the precipitation.

“We’re doing at least as well as our suburban counterparts, and on many occasions doing even better,” he said. “But it doesn’t mean we don’t have a lot more to do.”

Sewell Chan reported from Washington, and Liz Robbins from New York. Scott Shane contributed reporting from Baltimore, and John H. Cushman Jr. from Bethesda, Md.