Over the past week, some St. Louis residents have expressed concern about slow snow cleanup operations in residential areas. City officials say they are now using resources from other departments to help plow neighborhood streets.
“We attempt every attempt that we can, but we have to look at the size of our fleet and the width of the road, and you have cars parked on the street, it's no way on some and most of our residential routes that we will even be able to get a snowplow down that street,” said Betherny Williams, St. Louis streets department director.
During a winter storm, road crews must first clear arterial roads and hill routes, then move to residential streets. Mayor Tishaura Jones said last week during a press conference that many of the streets were not plowed yet because residents left cars in the path of plows, which could not enter the streets without damaging cars.
Williams said there is a shortage of street maintenance workers, but to help speed up the recovery process, about 50 staff members from other divisions including employees from the refuse and inspections department signed up to help with snow treatment and removal. Its forestry division also provided smaller snowplows to help break up snow and ice packs on narrow residential streets.
The city’s estimated fiscal 2025 streets department budget predicted about 12 snow or flood events. Also, it estimates that during this year’s winter storms, it will use about 6,000 tons of salt, an increase from 3,540 tons last year.
This fiscal year, the city decreased its spending on street materials and supplies, which includes salt, by nearly $500,000. It also decreased its personal services, which includes the streets department staff salaries, by about $105,000.
Williams said the city did not cut its streets department budget for snow removal and flood control but reallocated the money to other funds within the department.
“We looked at it for our street maintenance, putting more funds into our pothole patching, so it was not that it was cut,” she said. “When we look at purchasing the salt, we made that decision based on the quantities that we had, it was not feasible to purchase more salt, and then if you just look at it facility wise, we wouldn't have anywhere to place the salt."
She added that the decision to decrease the materials and supplies expenditures was only made for this year because the city has enough salt to cover this year’s winter operations.
St. Louis County also had challenges with quickly clearing snow from residential streets. Officials say being short-staffed played a role in its winter operations.
“This past storm, coupled with the sleet — which is harder to push, it's more dense and a wet snow is dense as well — it just slows the process of clearing the roadways,” said Stephanie Leon Streeter, the county's Department of Transportation and Public Works director. “We're down 40 drivers, so that is not insignificant in terms of getting roads cleared.”
She said that the shortage in staff has been an issue for a while and that she has tried to press upon St. Louis County Executive Sam Page and the county council the importance of providing greater appropriations toward salaries to attract and retain employees.
“Page had put forward money in the budget he had submitted for 2025 that included better pay for staff through the result of a job study that was done, but the council removed it from the budget, and it's up to them to put money back into the budget if we're going to see any way of getting past this issue,” Leon Streeter said.
Some state highways and interstates and their exit and entrance ramps and portions of St. Louis Lambert International Airport, which is maintained by the Missouri Department of Transportation, also saw piles of unplowed snow over the past week. MoDOT experienced challenges with plowing because of its lack of staff as well. It is down several hundred workers.
“This is really only our first or second snow that we've had this season, so we had about a third of our operators that just did not have any snow removal experience,” said Becky Allmeroth, MoDOT’s director of transportation. “We're not fully staffed, but we did move teams from other parts of the state to help in the St Louis area.”
The airport was tricky to plow because its ramps, bridges and barrier walls trapped snow, and plow trucks were not able to move it. And Allmeroth said the pretreatment that workers laid out before the snowstorm barely worked because of frigid temperatures.
“Whenever it's zero degrees or even five to 10 degrees, it takes 10 times more salt than if it were 30 degrees, so your chemicals just quit working,” she said.
After speaking with state officials in Indiana, Allmeroth advised her team to use different salt techniques like placing a salt brine down first and then salt to help de-ice the ground for an easier plow.
“I’m not sure even if we would have been fully staffed, this still would have been a very challenging storm,” Allmeroth said. “You had to stay on the interstates in the major roads to keep treating them so that we didn't lose those, but we did not have enough trucks to peel off and hit those ramps when all that snow just kept getting packed against it, that's why we had to come back at a later time to clean up, so it's very challenging all around.”
