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Tuesday, December 22, 2009

City declaring victory over snow

The city sent out a press release yesterday afternoon detailing its snow removal procedures; it said that weekend work cleared snow emergency routes, secondary streets, and most residential streets, and that other residential streets were dealt with yesterday (the release concedes that trucks couldn't get down some narrow streets). Mayor Nutter is quoted in the Inquirer this morning saying "our folks have done an incredible job under incredible circumstances,"and Streets Commissioner Clarena Tolson says the city's response has been "almost a miracle."

The Inquirer doesn't find much to contradict this, leading its article by saying things could have been "much, much worse" -- only mentioning, as far as troubles go, some of the hills in Manayunk.

Even the comments section in our post from yesterday soliciting feedback about the storm -- not always the place to go for a positive take on city government -- has a bunch of complimentary comments in it. (Says
dd27: "I have to say the city did an excellent job! During the storm of 96' it took me 3 days to get out!")

Of course, we realize the verdict isn't necessarily in yet. What did the city do well? What could it have done better? Tell us below or at the Streets Department page on Howl.

The other variable by which to judge the city on its storm performance will be money -- whether it managed to perform snow services at a reasonable cost. We don't have much information on that yet. Tolson declined to give an estimate to the Inquirer, and the mayor simply said, "these events are what they are."

Review city services on our sister site, City Howl.
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Every year, city government spends slightly more than $4 billion. Where does all that money come from? More importantly, where does it go? Are we getting the most bang for our tax buck? “It's Our Money” is a joint project between Philadelphia Daily News and WHYY, funded by the William Penn Foundation, designed to answer these questions.




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