Snow job

Mother nature finally came to the rescue this week, melting much of the snow city Public Works plows seemingly couldn’t clear. February’s last wintry gusts made it a rough going in the city last week, after one arctic blast after the next pummeled the northeast. But while crews around the Capital Region hustled to clear roads, it almost seemed like the city’s Public Works plows stopped running altogether.

Streets buried by Tuesday’s storm remained largely covered Wednesday, despite a snow emergency being declared by the city. Temperatures dipped to -10 degrees and lower iced down just about anything exposed to the elements for more than a few seconds. And then another storm hit Friday.

Simply put, the city’s roads and walkways were abominable over this spell. Even a warming trend over the weekend didn’t seem to clear much. Overall, the city streets seemed starkly different from those maintained by the state, county and other municipalities.

In the warm world of cyberspace, there’s been a quiet but audible murmur about the either failing response or absence of action by Public Works crews. The easiest criticism to launch is against Skip Scirocco, the department’s newly installed commissioner, who is getting a taste of a primary function his post governs: Snow removal. Early critics suggest it’s Scirocco’s ineptitude in running Public Works that lead to the drastically bad conditions last week.

But Scirocco is one of the only changes the DPW has witnessed between this winter and last. In truth, the department -including Deputy Commissioner Pat Design -hasn’t changed very much at all. This suggests there could be a more concerted effort to balk the new leadership; a “mutiny underplow,” as one anonymous poster suggested on a Saratogian blog.

And then there’s the more official, but less believable cause for the snow-choked thoroughfares: No salt. The Capital Region’s media has blathered on at infinitum over the waning supply of road salt in the area has forced crews to combine their remaining supplies with sand. The result has been less melt on the roadways and thus a bit more snow for residents to slog through, they contend.

Interestingly enough, crews only now seem like they’re starting to remove the massive snow piles narrowing roads and blinding corners, nearly a week after the brunt of the storms touched down. This is despite Scirocco declaring another snow emergency Saturday and pronounced spells without winter weather last week, during which DPW dump trucks would ordinarily be seen hauling snow out of the streets.

Perhaps all this is quite subjective; it’s tough to gauge the response from one snow storm to the next. And perhaps Scirocco and Design are trying to reduce the department’s level of overtime during the closing moments of a season when rank-and-file workers rack up the extra pay.

However, the seemingly poor performance last week could also be the harbinger of some departmental breakdowns in wake of the DPW’s first commissioner change in decades. At the very least, Scirocco should offer the public some sort of report about the ongoing clean up effort tonight, if for no other reason than to allay the perception of its slow progress and the formation of a departmental rift