Six days without school. Children walking in the middle of busy roads. Cancer patients unable to travel to their doctors.
It took far too long to clear Montgomery County streets after a snowstorm buried the region more than a week ago, its elected leaders agreed during a Tuesday briefing on the county’s response.
Chris Conklin, director of the county’s transportation department, said it wasn’t equipped for the task.
“If you wanted to have everything open in a storm like this after, say, two days, you would need three times the resources that we have,” Conklin said.
The work, Conklin added, is “brute force. It’s ugly. It’s big. And it had to be done.”
Residents — on social media, in calls to elected officials and at a virtual town hall Monday night — have complained about unplowed roads and icy sidewalks days after the snow fell. They compared Montgomery County schools to neighboring districts that opened sooner.
A call for coordination
Council members said it didn’t help that the schools blamed the county when, days after the snowfall, roads and sidewalks leading up to schools remained impassable.
“It’s not working together,” Council member Kate Stewart said. “We got blasted by constituents.”
Many of those constituents reported not seeing a snowplow on their streets for days after the snowfall.
Council President Natali Fani-González, who added the storm response briefing to Tuesday’s council agenda, said county departments were “competing against each other for the same contractors.”
Other council members called for a clearer plan to divvy up snow-clearing responsibilities among agencies. Andrew Friedson, who represents District 1, asked about existing protocols for such coordination.
Conklin said they’re outdated and simply require state agencies to communicate with one another.
“That doesn’t sound like a protocol,” Friedson said.
Snow stories
More than 400 people tuned into a virtual town hall hosted by at-large council member Will Jawando Monday night to discuss the county’s storm response. He told the council on Tuesday about a homeowner “who had to pay $5,000 out of pocket to clear what plows left behind.”
Stewart said her office interceded to help two residents, including a cancer patient, get to critical medical appointments. She also noted that some of her constituents could not navigate snowy, icy streets to collect food distributed at neighborhood schools.
MCPS opened schools on Tuesday with a two-hour delay and is expected to do the same on Wednesday.
Schoolchildren are still having a hard time getting to class, said council member Evan Glass, referencing a video he saw of community members hoisting dozens of Silver Spring elementary schoolchildren over piles of snow so they could get to a school bus stop.
Council member Kristin Mink said she watched children walk in the middle of busy University Boulevard to avoid piles of ice and snow on the way to school.
Future storms
Conklin said the county should amend its code to allow a snow emergency to be declared on a Sunday, which would require drivers to move cars to make room for snowplows. This storm, which dropped between 6 and 12 inches of snow on the county that quickly froze, fell on a Sunday.
Luke Hodgson, director of the county’s Office of Emergency Management and Homeland Security, told the council that the county should have handled the storm better.
But he also suggested a “mismatch in the expectations amongst the public and what can realistically be done.”
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