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Civic duty

St. Albert has long prided itself on being a city with a small-town feel. That small-town feel is no wishful thinking: neighbours helping neighbours is such a common sight in St. Albert it borders on routine.

St. Albert has long prided itself on being a city with a small-town feel.

That small-town feel is no wishful thinking: neighbours helping neighbours is such a common sight in St. Albert it borders on routine.

Every winter, kind residents – from peewee AA hockey players involved in the Snow In Motion program to neighbours who just want to help out – keep their neighbourhoods open and accessible by shovelling, spreading salt and sand, or strapping plows to the front of their trucks to help clear their streets of snow.

While not a requirement of living in the city, these gestures fill a gap in services left by St. Albert’s residential snow-clearing policy, which mandates packed snow must accumulate beyond six centimetres before a clearing is ordered.

Residents helping each other is an important part of how any municipality functions. Yet every time a residential clearing is announced, there are a small minority of people who ruin it for the rest: people who leave their cars on their streets, forcing road crews to navigate around them, often leaving piles of snow and ice in the process.

Measuring the extent of this problem is no doubt difficult since moving one’s vehicle is currently a voluntary (if courteous) act. The problem is big enough, though, to gain Mayor Cathy Heron’s support for a seasonal parking ban.

Heron told the Gazette this week, following a discussion on her Facebook page about such a ban, that she wants to find a way to make sure vehicles are off the streets when plows go by.

“The question is do you ticket them and tow them to an impound lot or just move them? Do you ticket and move them? These are all the decisions we would have to figure out,” she said. Heron also envisioned the possibility of having contracted tow trucks go ahead of all the snowplows to move vehicles.

Figuring it all out should not be that complicated. Lining up tow trucks is not practical and would bog down the entire process as plows wait for tow trucks to clear the streets. If one were in favour of a parking ban, wouldn’t the simple answer be to pass a bylaw, provide advance notice to residents, ticket the vehicles and plow around them? It won’t take long for offenders to get the message and leave the roads clear for the plows.

The truth of the matter is virtually everyone wants their streets cleared of snow. Few would purposefully leave a vehicle on the street knowing that to move it later would mean clearing away the windrow  themselves.

Residents cannot always predict when snow-clearing will take place, and there are countless, valid reasons why vehicles are left on the streets. A punitive parking ban should be the last resort.

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