Snowbound in Sask.: What guides Regina’s budget and snow response?

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Imagine: as darkness sets in and most people are tucked into bed, it begins to snow in Regina. Throughout the night as the wind blusters and blows, it keeps snowing … and snowing … and snowing.

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By the time the earliest risers awake, the entire city is draped with a thick, pristine white blanket that’s several inches deep. For some, it’s banked up far too high to get out of their homes or down their street.

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As residents peer out their frosty windows, their first question is: “when will the snow plows be out?”

The Leader-Post has parsed through the City of Regina’s snow policy to try and answer that question and more.

Here’s what we learned:

When is the big machinery deployed and where?

Chris Warren, director of roadways and transportation, says the most common myth about the city’s snow crews is that their work starts only at the end of a storm.

“The reality is that we’ve got a lot of employees out on the roads during a storm,” he said while standing in front of a scraper truck in the city’s public works depot on north Albert Street.

“We have an awesome team that is always looking ahead to the forecast in Regina, and if we see any (snow) conditions we immediately start preparing.”

Warren is referencing what’s known as “storm mode,” which means snow crews are out de-icing and attempting to keep roads clear enough to not be hazardous.

In the post-storm haze, residents clamour for what the city calls a “systematic plow” — a street-by-street approach to push or remove snow and make roads driveable after a storm.

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Warren says shifting his crews from storm mode to this type of plow is essentially a “reset,” which is required in order to begin hitting operational targets outlined in the city’s winter maintenance policy.

The city handles snow maintenance on all public streets, with the exception of parks, the F.W. Hill Mall and Wascana Centre. Roads are placed into one of five categories, ranked by priority based on use.

Major arterials like Ring Road and hospital routes top the list as Category 1 roads, while low-volume residential roads are at the bottom in Category 5 — and crews always start at the top.

A full plow for Category 1 streets is triggered any time it snows more than five centimetres. Back alleys, bike lanes, transit routes and school zones all fall within this segment too, as do sidewalks.

Downtown also gets a priority flag.

City policy says those roads are to be fully plowed within 48 hours of a snow event’s conclusion. Residential streets have a higher threshold of 15 centimetres before a full plow is triggered.

After the initial plow, crews move into follow-up mode over the next two weeks, then into regular maintenance mode. Things like tidying up snow ridges, sanding or scraping down ruts are continuous all season, said Warren.

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“It’s a day-and-night operation that we carry out all the way through until usually around April,” he explained. “It’s just a daily exercise of identifying what are the needs, prioritizing those needs, and then delivering on those needs.”

There’s roughly 50 employees working seven days a week on snow removal, with about 200 pieces of equipment at their disposal. Last winter, crews put in an estimated 140,000 hours.

“It’s a tough job,” said Warren. “They’re often working in adverse weather conditions, often working in the dark, often working around parked vehicles, driving vehicles.”

He estimated it takes about 10 days for crews to complete a full circuit around the city, including any maintenance duties or other post-storm efforts. This is because the City of Regina maintains over 6,000 kilometres of roads and alleys, plus 1,500 kilometres of sidewalks. Category 4 and 5 roads — residential streets — make up more than half of that volume.

Why don’t crews plow more often?

Warren’s short answer is: “Snow removal is a very expensive activity.”

The long answer is that the City of Regina budgets for a certain number of specific related tasks per season, basing it on the last five years of weather patterns and snowstorm severity.

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Currently, Regina plans for one big snow removal per season and at least six significant storms requiring a systematic or residential plow.

Fully removing snow from the streets is the most expensive work, costing about $10 million to clear all residential roads just once. For sidewalks, that figure is around $4 million.

“It requires at any given time a crew of upwards of four or five graders, front-end loaders with snow loaders on them, and upwards of 20 different semis to haul that snow away,” said Warren.

Just one systematic plow, where crews leave snow ridges, costs roughly $292,000 while a residential plow is about $363,000, according to a report that passed through council last fall. Ice control costs around $3.1 million per year.

Any surplus budget goes into a reserve fund, available for years like 2023 where winter hits harder than usual.

What is the snow budget this year?

The 2024 snow budget is set at $10.6 million, which is more than the past five years after the city spent nearly double its allotment in 2023 at $15.2 million.

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Regina’s weather ended up colder and fiercer than anticipated last year, causing the overrun. Crews did three times as many systematic plows than planned, spread 23,000 tonnes of sand and salt and hauled more than 900,000 cubic metres of snow to the city’s snow storage site.

For comparison, the City of Winnipeg clears more than 7,200 kilometres of roads (over 1,000 more than Regina) and stores an average of 1.7 million cubic metres of snow in its disposal sites — with an annual budget of $30 million or more.

“Any given winter experience can be different in the city,” said Warren. “We’re seeing both more major events per year and we’re also seeing an increase in the cost of inflation, purchasing materials, hiring contractors.”

Most people in Saskatchewan picture winter as stretching from October to April, but city budgets cover storm events on a fiscal calendar — January to April and then October to December. Regina’s first storm in late November dropped 10-15 centimetres of snow and put 2024’s budget at $7.7 million spent of an available $10.6 million.

The city says it’s projecting to still be within budget at year’s end in a few weeks, so long as December’s weather sticks close to normal.

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Regina is not the only city to experience growing pains when it comes to snow responses.

Saskatoon city council also upped its 2025 snow budget to $16.9 million from $15.8 million in 2024. A heavy-hitting storm in November had city officials warning that the 2024 budget was at max, and a full emergency plow would be too costly at $18 million.

Moose Jaw also struggled under the weight of the first snowfall, with crews still working weeks after the fact. The city budgets just $1.4 million to handle four major snow events — that’s around $450,000 per snowstorm.

“We can understand that sometimes we can’t plan for everything,” said Warren. “We try to ensure that we make the right decisions for whatever the community needs.”

lkurz@postmedia.com

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