City's Snow Response Gets Chilly Reception

Bethlehem officials were taken to task by West Side residents at City Council Tuesday night for what they described as a failure in responsiveness to the most recent winter storm, which dumped 11 inches of snow on the city.

Adding insult to injury, at least in the minds of some, was the subsequent treatment by police and city streets crews surrounding parking spaces, including a much-publicized sweep through Bethlehem streets to round up buckets, lawn chairs, traffic cones and other items to put an end to a practice of reserving shoveled parking spaces.

“All this, in the time of a budget crisis?” asked Vince Paden, a resident of 521 Ninth Ave. “Why such a swift and heavy-handed response? All because of one incident.”

Paden said it seemed to him that the city’s response to the lawn chairs was speedier than its response to plowing Jones Street, a one-block alley behind his house, which he said he had to pay someone to plow a day after the storm so that his wife could drive to work. The lack of plowing on Jones also delayed garbage pickup, Paden said.

“Every time it snows, I have to call City Hall and then try to explain to someone where the hell (Jones Street) is,” Paden said.

Others in the neighborhood were similarly frustrated. Angel Hernandez of 210 Eighth Ave. said he has been ticketed numerous times for parking partially on the sidewalk because stubborn snow banks have limited parking on his block. Nancy Matuczinski of 716 Sixth Ave. also complained that the plowing and snow removal was inadequate.

“A snow emergency should have been declared,” observed Dana Grubb, a former city employee and frequent administration critic at council meetings. That would have enabled curb-to-curb plowing and snow removal along various streets in the city, he said.

Piled up snow banks of five, six or seven feet still block visibility at traffic intersections, Grubb complained. Parking in front of the Rose Garden and Nitschmann Middle School remains limited because snow was never plowed or removed, he added.

Mike Alkhal, the city’s public works director, defended the work of his department employees in a “difficult” storm. One reason why a snow emergency never was declared, he said, is that the forecast called for only three to six inches of snow up until three or four hours before the storm ended. The final amount doubled the prediction.

No city plow brings the snow down to macadam level on the first pass and snow fell so heavily at times that it looked as if there had not been any plowing by the time a plow arrived for a second pass. That made it difficult, too, to get to secondary roads as quickly as the city would have liked. Alkhal said he thought Bethlehem’s response to this storm was as good as any neighboring community.

Mayor John Callahan admitted that the removal of chairs, buckets and traffic cones as parking placeholders might have been handled in a better way.

“I understand the sense of ownership if I spent a couple of hours shoveling out a space,” the mayor said. “There was more than one incident. There were lots of disputes.”

Though city law prohibits use of items to reserve public parking spaces, he gave city police credit for showing restraint in waiting more than a week to begin enforcing that law. However, he said he thought more notice should have been given before the sweep began and that residents who were there should have been allowed to collect the items they had put in the street.

“For us, we’re not looking to collect chairs and or buckets. That’s just something else the city has to dispose of,” Callahan said.

“There’s a balance we have to strike,” the mayor continued. “We’ve learned some lessons. If we were to do it again, we would do some things differently."