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While many Montrealers might be in winter avoidance mode, Mayor Soraya Martinez Ferrada says the city itself is winter ready.
During a news conference Thursday morning, Martinez Ferrada announced $15.8 million to modernize winter road maintenance, including $13.3 million for 43 new snow removal machines.
“We feel we’re ready for this winter. We’re going to try a few things, maybe a few things won’t work, but we’re committed to the service of citizens,” she said.
The new machinery includes 19 loaders, 13 snowblowers and 11 jets used to spread abrasives.
The remaining $2.5 million will go toward reinforcing spreading operations in the boroughs with more than 16 additional pieces of equipment.
The city also has 115 snow-removal contracts, with 55 per cent with the public sector and 45 per cent the private sector.
Martinez Ferrada took a lot of heat last season over the state of the city’s streets, not only in terms of snow removal but also the number and size of potholes being reported.
Martinez Ferrada said when her administration took office in November, it was too late to make any changes.
“It was a reality that hit us hard,” she said. “When we arrived at city hall, we found aging equipment and machinery in poor condition — gear that required extensive maintenance and additional resources.”
She says her administration inherited “a maintenance deficit” in terms of the city’s road network and that residents are right to expect and demand better services.
Since last year, Martinez Ferrada says city crews have fixed 200,000 potholes and the city aims to double its pothole repair capacity.
Starting in January, two specialized hubs made up of 24 additional blue-collar workers divided into eight mobile teams will be devoted to pothole repair. A call for tender is also underway to purchase eight mechanical pothole repair machines.
Split over salt
Martinez Ferrada said the creation of a new weather and operations’ monitoring centre to track and anticipate weather events will allow for the “right resources” to be deployed at the “right time.”
The city is also exploring options like using AI to track where equipment is, where repairs are needed and to help with crew co-ordination.
A new platform called Go-Géo will also be rolled out gradually over the winter, allowing the public to track sidewalk salting and snow-clearing operations online and in real time.
Montreal will also test a starfish-based de-icing additive, which is already being used in other cities.
After reluctance to use salt because of infrastructure and environmental concerns, the mayor said it will be used on streets to melt ice.
“We can’t go without it, unfortunately,” she said, adding sidewalks present one of the biggest challenges.
Céline-Audrey Beauregard, the borough mayor in Verdun, wasn’t happy to hear about the salt.
She says no one wants residents to slip and injure themselves, but there are ways to use less salt — namely by doing a better job of clearing the snow from the streets.
And while Beauregard is on board with certain aspects of the city’s plan, she says she’s skeptical about how it will all play out.
“It’s not clear to me who is going to take the decisions, who is the chef d’orchestre,” she said, in terms of who and when snow-clearing and snow-removal operations are called.
Beauregard said she also wonders how much of a margin of manoeuvre boroughs will have.
She said that while boroughs were consulted in the spring about their needs, they never heard back, until now, about what solutions were being considered.