City of Waterloo sees nearly 3K icy sidewalk complaints last winter

The City of Waterloo is looking to remind residents ensuring winter accessibility remains a shared responsibility.

The reminder comes as the city said it received nearly 3,000 complaints last winter about icy sidewalks, resulting in more than 800 snow-clearing orders — about four times as many as were issued in 2020.

It also comes as the city maintains its plowing plate is already quite full.

“We currently clear about 165 kilometres of sidewalks and trails, that's in addition to the 850 kilometres of roads and side-streets,” said Waterloo Mayor Dorothy McCabe. “That's over a thousand kilometres that need to be cleared after every snowfall — and sometimes during snowfalls.”

The mayor did also make note last year's winter was, hopefully, a bit of an anomaly.

“We had five declared snow emergencies and some of those were multi-day events,” McCabe said, adding that can quickly make matters worse as it's more difficult to clear snow when more snow is still falling.

McCabe, meantime, did suggest a willingness to revisit the seemingly perennial request from home-owners for it to take over snow-clearing responsibilities for all roads and sidewalks, while also noting a recent staff report which found that could come at an additional cost of about $3-million per year — essentially doubling what already gets spent.

“So I think that's something that we're open to hearing what that is and thinking about, broadly, the accessibility issues that may solve for people,” she said. “There is [also] the matter of staff that would need to go along with that, equipment that would need to go along with that, storage of that kind of equipment, and those kinds of things too.”

“So it's a broader discussion that council would have to have.”