Boulder residents ski down side roads, city council rethinks plowing policy
With almost half a foot of snow in Boulder Saturday, the snowy roads were a big topic of conversation in the Colorado city, and a source of frustration for city council member Mark Wallach.
"You could literally put on a pair of skis and go down this slope," Wallach said about a snowy street nearby. As a matter of fact, some people actually did cross-country ski through Boulder's side roads.
Wallach explained that the snowy roads can be a safety concern. "People have been crashing through intersections and hitting other cars," he said.
Snowplows came out for the 5 inches of snowfall in Boulder Saturday, but a new city policy this winter means that for anything less than 3 inches plows might not be coming to your neighborhood.
"There's hardly anything that is more fundamental than plowing a road, fixing a pothole, and it certainly makes us as a government look badly," Wallach said.
As a member of the city council, Wallach may have actually supported this plan. The Transportation Department has been working on the plan since 2022 and began presenting and taking feedback on it in 2023.
"This was not a fault of staff. This was, if there's any fault here, it's really the council. We just didn't think it through correctly," Wallach said.
The Transportation Department made the plan to address the challenges of a strict budget and a snowplow driver shortage. In 2024, the snowplow budget was more than $1.6 million.
The department's new plan expands plowing on the main roads but scales back work on the side roads. Some side roads may not see any plows at all when it snows less than three inches, which has happened 20 times this year.
Wallach said he wants to bring the conversation back to the table.
"I do not want to spend money we don't have, but I want us to have the conversation to find the money for something that is so fundamental," Wallach said.
Wallach is now pushing for the plowing decisions to take a closer look at more weather factors like if below freezing temperatures could follow a thin layer of snow, or if it's expected to melt quickly.
"The solution I am looking for is to authorize the head of transportation to make different decisions when it comes to a snow of three inches or less," Wallach said.
CBS Colorado reached out to the city transportation department but they were not available for an interview. The city council is expected to take up this issue at a meeting in February.
