Because you had contacted me during the snow emergency to let me know about problems you were having with the County’s snow removal efforts, I wanted to report back to you as a result of the Council’s briefing from the Montgomery County Transportation Department on the recent snow storm and their performance in clearing our streets. Many areas in the County received up to two feet of snow and this proved to be an additional challenge for our dedicated County workers.
During the briefing I took the opportunity to share all of the emails and phone messages that my office fielded during those days. I thought it important for the Department to understand both the timing and the location of the problems. Several issues became clearer after the briefing.

1. The Department pursues a “bare pavement” standard for primary and secondary roads. The result of this policy for this storm was the delay in beginning to clear neighborhood streets until the Monday morning after the storm. Each primary and secondary road was cleared of blowing and accumulating snow and plowed 5 times before they began neighborhood plowing. Their intention is to assure access for emergency vehicles. To further that effort, plows were assigned to specific fire and rescue locations in case access to unplowed roads proved necessary. I questioned the Department’s bare pavement standard and recommended that they consider a phased-in approach to neighborhood plowing sooner so that we don’t again see such disparity in the timing for the clearing of our streets.
2. The map on the County web site was inaccurate. It appears that part of the problem was in the definition of “your streets have been plowed”. If a plow had done an initial swipe of the street, it appeared on the map as “done” even though the crews understood that it would take more than one pass to make our streets workable. This problem was exacerbated by the slow timing in getting to the neighborhoods and the condition of the streets when they were finally addressed. Cars had attempted to traverse the neighborhood streets thus compacting the snow and making it harder to clear.
3. Crews are assigned work using the GIS mapping of the County. There are problems with this map and I have asked the Department to review the GIS map in conjunction with the email complaints I received to ensure that streets are properly depicted on the map.