Kansas City overhauled its approach to snow removal. Blizzard response shows some payoff
Kansas City Manager Brian Platt was more than 10 hours into his shift behind the wheel of a snow plow – yes, even the head guy was out there clearing the streets – when he pulled over long enough late Tuesday afternoon to give a progress report.
“We’re like, what is it – 36 hours post the end of this storm? And the city’s back to normal,” he said. “I’ve been all over the city and, yeah, we’ve got some neighborhoods left to do, but our main streets are open. Downtown is bare pavement.”
The Kansas City metro had lots of warning that a blizzard was heading our way. And some cities, counties and state agencies did better than others in preparing for the historic snowfall that we’re still digging out from.
The Unified Government of Wyandotte County and Kansas City, Kansas, for example, had to suspend its snow removal operations Monday night because of “cold and icy conditions.” Before that, crews had yet to touch hardly any residential streets in KCK, leaving some residents feeling stuck and neglected.
But Kansas City officials were proud of the job they performed and all the planning and preparation that went into it.
An effort that began four years ago to revamp and improve snow removal in a city known for being bad at that job culminated in what leaders and some residents deem a success in addressing this year’s snowpocalypse. Crews have worked around the clock since even before the first precipitation fell in the form of freezing rain Saturday afternoon.
It was all hands on deck. Platt along with his department heads, city planners and office clerks worked alongside the snow removal pros in the public works department with an aggressive attack that’s common in many northern cities, but which was unheard of in Kansas City a few years ago.
The result was that Kansas City streets were in far better shape sooner than in many neighboring communities, reversing a generations-long trend of the opposite.
As of Tuesday afternoon, Kansas City crews had plowed most streets twice so they could be ready for the next go around. More snow is in the forecast for later this week.
At that point, Overland Park still had about half of its residential streets left to plow.
“We hear from residents a lot that they feel like this is one of the things that we do really well, that they see a ton of improvement,” said city press secretary Sherae Honeycutt. “There’s always going to be somebody that feels like we didn’t get (to their street) fast enough, but I think far and away, it’s changed a lot.”
It’s changed so much for the better that in 2023 Kansas City won the Excellence in Snow and Ice Control Award from the American Public Works Association. Not exactly a Golden Globe, but in the world of snow removal, it’s something to brag about.
Hayley Walters, who lives in Columbus Park and owns Service Printing and Graphics Inc. in the Paseo West area, said the streets around her business seemed well-plowed, while just a thin strip had been cleared down her neighborhood street.
“I think they did an overall pretty decent job,” she said.
“Overall the main roads seem fine to me. There’s obviously some things that need to be cleaned up, but considering how much snow we got, I didn’t think it was horrible.”
Not everyone’s happy. Some residents are posting on social media that their streets are still a mess. The city’s new approach allows residents to check plows’ progress in real-time on a map, which they can reference when making 311 requests.
Tim Bullock, a resident of Lea Manor in south Kansas City, paused for a few minutes while clearing a path from his driveway to vent.
It was clear that a snowplow had been down the middle of the street sometime, but it had not made a second pass, leaving behind a hefty wall of snow that would have to be cleared before he could leave his driveway.
“I’m impressed with how quickly they can get a vehicle out here to even make that single pass,” he said. “It just would simply be nice if they would do both sides of the street like they used to do years ago.”
Reversing a trend
Snow removal has long been among the top priorities of Kansas City residents who fill out annual surveys asking how well they think City Hall is doing in providing services.
And for decades under multiple mayors and city managers, it was also the area where City Hall fell far short of expectations. Just over half of those surveyed in 2005 and 2020 were satisfied or very satisfied with how well the city performed snow removal on major city streets.
That meant that about half of the city’s residents were neutral or less than-thrilled with how city street crews handled snow removal. And only about a third of those responding were pleased with snow removal on residential streets.
After three days of snow and ice in 2018, the public’s frustration boiled over when then-City Manager Troy Schulte announced on Twitter that crews had completed snow removal operations at a time when many residents had yet to see a snow plow down their street.
“It makes you feel upset and abandoned,” one resident said at the time.
Kansas Citians had come to expect bad service after snowstorms. About the best they could hope for was for the weather to change so the snow and ice would melt.
Platt’s priority
Platt vowed to change things for the better when he took over in the winter of 2020 and 2021. A month after setting up shop on the 29th floor of City Hall, he issued a press release about being less than impressed with how KC responded to a New Year’s Eve snowstorm.
He had plenty of experience clearing snow as city manager of Jersey City, New Jersey, which receives 29 inches of snow each winter on average, compared to 18 inches here.
Platt announced a new and more aggressive strategy to plow and treat streets during snowstorms. From then on, he said, Kansas City would adopt “a smarter and more collaborative deployment of our already available resources.”
Plowing would continue around the clock, rather than 12 hours on and 12 hours off, as was the practice before. The men and women plowing the streets wouldn’t be working double shifts without sleep.
Instead, Platt’s plan was to expand the number of workers plowing the streets by cross-training the city’s workforce.
City workers who normally drive garbage trucks or patch streets the rest of the year learn how to plow snow in the off-season. And when a lot of it falls as it did this past weekend, they are reassigned from trash routes and road repair to tackle it.
The city’s snow team this season had 400 employees available to drive 300 trucks on 103 routes to clear 6,400 lane miles.
Even Platt plows snow with a large Ford 350 pickup truck that has a snowblade attached. He’s not licensed to drive a big truck, otherwise he would.
“Don’t need a CDL for it, and they’re relatively easy to drive,” he said.
Tech for snowplows
Kansas City has also gotten smarter about how it plows, by having trucks working in pairs and in tandem on wide streets to make sure lanes are cleared on a single pass.
It better prepares for storms, by pre-treating the roadways before the ice can stick and the snow falls. In addition to regular road salt, the city uses blue magnesium chloride – commonly known as Ice Ban – that a lot of other cities use because it works better than standard calcium chloride at subzero temperatures.
Plus it is non-toxic. It won’t kill vegetation along roadways and streams, the way regular road salt does, and it doesn’t sting the paws of dogs who walk on it.
“Something new we did this time, we pre-treated all of the residential streets with the Ice Ban because we knew it would cut out the snow faster than regular salt,” Honeycutt said. “And we know it takes longer to get to all the residential streets, so we put that down first, as opposed to just regular salt to make sure that we’re getting everything as evenly as we can.”
Finally, the city uses technology to monitor which streets have been plowed and how often, as well as where there are trouble spots that need special attention.
Each snow plow has a tablet in it with software that shows where they are and what routes they’ve done. It was developed by Rubicon Technologies, and initially Kansas City used it to track its garbage trucks.
But now it not only helps people at the snow command center coordinate operations by keeping track of the snow plows. And residents can discern where it’s safe to drive by checking out the city’s snow map.
“Every plow has an iPad in it that helps us track where we have plowed, where needs to be plowed, and then that also shows us what has not been plowed recently and what we need to go back and plow again,” Honeycutt said.
So there’s hope for Bullock and others waiting for a plow to make a second or third pass.
One thing Platt notices is that the better Kansas City gets at snow removal, the higher people’s expectations become. The city aims to meet them, he said.
“Every storm we get better, and we learn something new, and we’re keeping it moving,” he said. “I think it’s just a different mentality and approach, and just in raising the bar here.”
This story was originally published January 8, 2025 at 6:00 AM.
