Will Anchorage again face massive snow disruptions this winter?

Sep. 22—As termination dust speckles Chugach peaks, Anchorage officials are readying for the snow.

It's been a main issue in city politics after back-to-back heavy snow years caused massive disruptions for residents. City Hall's management of snow removal became a key part of this spring's mayor's race — former Mayor Dave Bronson was lambasted for his response, and during her campaign against him, Mayor Suzanne LaFrance promised she would get the roads plowed. This winter, the question is: Can she?

"I'm not gonna sugarcoat it, we have some big challenges in front of us," LaFrance said during a Wednesday media conference laying out new measures to prevent another "snowmageddon."

"A big difference is the coordination, and just meeting head-on the challenges and identifying what are the roadblocks to snowplowing," LaFrance said in an interview afterward. "It's a public safety issue and I think there is greater recognition of that."

The administration has what it calls a "safe snow strategy," overseen by municipal manager Becky Windt Pearson, which consists of "breaking down silos across municipal departments to ensure planning, personnel, fleet, budget, and communications staff are working together to guarantee preparedness, transparency, and coordination well in advance of the first flake," according to a prepared statement from the administration.

Part of that strategy is managing residents' expectations. Windt Pearson has spoken repeatedly to the Assembly about "level setting" when it comes to the status of municipal services, many of which have withered in the last decade of Alaska's weak economy and retreating state budgets.

LaFrance officials have stressed, too, that the city government they inherited in July from the Bronson administration had major problems in staff vacancies, turnover in leadership, and haphazard financial administration.

"It's a critical priority in our community. We're a winter community. And we've got to have a plan and the ability to deliver on that plan," LaFrance said.

Overall, the mayor said, while the city is not where many leaders would like for it to be in terms of assets and resources, they are heading into this winter in better shape than last.

"If we have another heavy snow year, even though we're not gonna be probably 100% staffed up, or we won't have the equipment we need to get when the first snowflakes fall, we're better positioned, as far as communications, and proceeding step-by-step to implement this overall plan," LaFrance said.

What failed last year

Last winter was particularly rough for Anchorage. The 2023-24 season was the second snowiest on record, but that total belies that three significant snow dumps happened back-to-back-to-back starting in mid-November. Before the winter ended, the school district had kept its buildings closed an unprecedented six days. Roofs on several commercial buildings collapsed under heavy snow loads, and nervous homeowners shelled out money to roof shovelers or else climbed up icy ladders to do it themselves.

Amid all of that, the large fleet of equipment and personnel tasked with clearing streets could not keep up with making all of the municipality's roads safely navigable in the amount of time many residents expect. It was taking longer to plow, grade and haul so much snow.

Officials tried to compensate for the system's shortcomings by hiring out extra contracts to private companies for services, but at a certain point it became a financial arms race between different entities scrambling to hire the same pool of workers.

"There was a lot of competition, and the price went up very quickly once everyone in town realized that snow removal was now a hot priority and, whether it was roofs or grounds or snow movement, really the resources in Anchorage were tapped out," said James Anderson, chief operating officer for the Anchorage School District.

The school district is one of the city's major plow players. It has several million square feet of school roofs it must clear, along with parking lots and walkways. But it relies on the state and municipality to clean up the roadways to and in the neighborhoods where students and teachers live.

The school closures happened because teachers and students could not drive out on so many unplowed neighborhood streets, which are the lowest priority level for the plow fleet and remained buried for days.

To prevent this from happening again, members of the school district began meeting in August with officials from the state's Department of Transportation and Public Facilities, as well as members of the new LaFrance administration. Anderson said he'd never seen senior executives from the three entities all convening to figure out snow plans so early in the year.

"We're sitting much better now than we were at the beginning of last year," he said.

Anderson was addressing a special meeting of the Anchorage Assembly's Transportation Committee in September. The session began with the knock of a gavel followed by the theme music from "Game of Thrones."

"Winter is coming," said committee chair Daniel Volland.

In their presentation to the Assembly, members of the LaFrance administration broke down the basic formula that hampered snow removal in the last two winters: way more snow than usual, and fewer bodies to move it.

"That increased work was done in some of the lowest resource years that the municipality has experienced in recent memory," Windt Pearson said.

The resources in play were equipment, the staff to operate it and money to pay additional hauling and contracted services. In the three winters between 2017 and 2019, which had relatively average snow totals, the Street Maintenance division with the city's Maintenance and Operations Department that handles snow removal had 81 or more full-time staff working on plow outs.

By contrast, the last two winters, which were much snowier, had 65 of those positions filled one year and 67 the next. The city has made progress filling some of those slots ahead of this season, and in early September had seven job offers in process. But the municipality is competing with the state, airport and private companies for qualified heavy-equipment operators, and still has a vacancy rate around 30% in the Maintenance and Operations Department.

In its "level-setting," the administration has told the Assembly that shortcomings in the snow removal system will not be fixed in a matter of months, but years.

"We're dealing with issues like staffing vacancies head on," LaFrance said. "I'm looking at: How do we make the jobs more competitive? Obviously, there are wage increases that need to happen, and coordination with the union, too."

'Old and rusted and broken'

The city is also buying more equipment, largely to replace aged pieces that have been pushed far beyond their prime.

This month, at the administration's request, the Assembly approved a measure to purchase three new graders for just under a million dollars. Separately, after closing the books on a recent fiscal year, the administration spotted $3.75 million in unspent funds that it asked the Assembly to reappropriate for buying three additional graders, 10 pickup trucks with plows, and a few other items, which members also approved.

While some of that equipment will arrive in time for this winter, graders have a yearlong lead time from purchase to delivery, so the six new units will not arrive until fall 2025. Within that same request, $750,000 is for fleet maintenance — replacement parts and repair labor — that the administration says has been underfunded since 2022.

The school district's vehicle fleet is even shabbier than the municipality's. Of the 55 pieces of heavy equipment it owns for snow clearing, the majority are over 20 years old, and eight are currently "non-mission capable," according to figures from Anderson. Among the failing equipment: three of the district's five dump trucks, 25% of its graders, two of its six front-loaders and half its sanding trucks. The essential machines are so dilapidated, Anderson said, that by January of last winter they were struggling and breaking down.

Anderson attributed the wear on the equipment to state funding cuts that started in 2016. With education budgets no longer inflation-proofed, life-cycle machine replacements have become impossible for the district. Anderson said that their fleet is in better shape this year than it was at the same time in 2023, but that the district is preparing to submit a bond for vehicle purchases to go before voters in April to address the problem more comprehensively.

"At this point, we either bond or, if this is the new normal, we are not going to be able to keep up," Anderson said. "Our equipment is old and rusted and broken. And we're keeping it operational, but it certainly has been a challenge for us."

For this winter, Anderson said the factor inspiring the most confidence in him is that city and state leaders are already communicating and strategizing.

As for the state's role in plowing out roadways in Southcentral Alaska, it is planning to adjust some of its operational policies and add extra capacity from the private sector.

Kirk Warren, chief of maintenance and operations for the state transportation department's central region, said they face many of the same staffing and equipment challenges as their counterparts in the municipality.

The state has also faced criticism from city leaders over the years for prioritizing high-speed plowing along the highways and leaving major arterial roadways that it's responsible for within the Anchorage Bowl uncleared for long periods, creating dangerous conditions in some of the busiest parts of town. At the Assembly work session, Warren said plow drivers will not need to adhere to the road prioritization hierarchy as rigidly this winter, which will reduce inefficiencies and delays along some roadways.

"We are more flexible now on the prioritization system, and we're seeing some improvements," Warren said.

The state also has $915,000 to pay for extra plowing services from private companies. It solicited bids from firms that can be called out to assist with plowing and sidewalk clearing along third- and fourth-tier priority roads in Anchorage, along with parts of the Kenai Peninsula and Matanuska-Susitna Borough.

Warren also said the state began switching its heavy equipment over to winter configurations a month earlier, and bought six more blowers for handling state-owned sidewalks.

The LaFrance administration also wants better communication with the public on snow operations. To that end, the Assembly confirmed a request for a contract worth $42,650 to try developing a new GPS system for residents to see where plow equipment is, which will replace the sector map that's been available on muni websites in recent years.

"The vision ... is that we will enable the public to have better visibility of what's coming and to prepare for it," Windt Pearson said, offering as an example that if residents saw a grader was coming into their neighborhood, they would know it was time to move their car off the street.

The administration thinks that if people can see the plow fleet's progress in real time, it might tamp down on some of the frustration and uncertainty.