The City of Fernie hosted a community open house to discuss the snow and ice management pilot project on February 25. Information boards, pamphlets, and representatives from the City of Fernie were scattered around the room. The event was created to further educate the public on the changes that will be coming, as well as give residents a chance to have their questions answered and their feedback received. This will help the city to better address resident needs and make changes to policies accordingly.
“Tonight is intended to provide information to the public on our pilot, how we came to this point, what triggered the need for a change, to help improve the community’s understanding of why we are going through this process, and to collect feedback from the public and generate some ideas on how we can move forward with this policy in the future and be able to incorporate that feedback into future recommendations to council,” said Zabrina Pendon, director of operations for the City of Fernie.
The snow and ice pilot will be in place until the end of this winter and involves the equitable delivery of the snow management service. Based off a prioritization framework, the project’s first priority is to promote continued access to emergency services, main city operational services, and the downtown business district. The second priority is promoting access to schools, essential city services, main business areas, and community facilities. The third priority involves providing support to recreation areas, light businesses, city operational services, and giving neighbourhoods and emergency services a secondary egress route. The penultimate priority is supporting local residential areas and driveway windrows, and the final priority is supporting downtown off street parking, alongside identifying other areas that will receive services when resources are available.
Prior to implementing the updated policy, the snow removal service was not equitable across all groups. The policy transformed and became unsustainable, meaning business areas and residential lanes were receiving incongruent services.
“It led to a point where every time it would snow five centimetres or more it would trigger what we would call a full plow. It would bring in 11 employees at 4 a.m. on overtime, working 12 hour shifts. This led to a number of different concerns, first of all related to employee health and safety,” said Pendon.
Issues pertaining to employee rights were a small fraction of the factors indicating the outdated policy needed to change.
Though many members of the community are still apprehensive in the face of these alterations, the City hopes that with more education through events such as these, the public will come to a better understanding as to why these changes have been put forth. Pendon reminded the public that the intent of the pilot project is to develop a clear, logical, and equitable framework to guide the delivery of a service that is very important to the community.
“I can sense that the community is uncomfortable with the change that is being proposed, so I am hoping that by providing them with more information, like the information that we have presented here on the boards, the reasons for why we got to this place, the prioritization framework, and the objectives of this policy update, that will help ease some of the concerns,” said Pendon.
For those unable to make it out to the event, the City is currently accepting ongoing feedback through their project email at snow@fernie.ca. The City will also continue their ongoing effort to gather community input through stakeholder meetings, meetings with the business community, and communication with operators. Once the pilot period ends, the City will issue a survey to collect public input that may not have been captured through the engagement process. Once all recommendations are processed, they will present the conglomerated input to council at a Committee of the Whole meeting.
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