Only months after taking over garbage collection, the city of St. Paul is gauging whether to bring another private service under its control: plowing alleys.
The city is partnering with the University of Minnesota to conduct an online survey about alley plowing. It's open until May 3, and any St. Paul resident can participate, regardless of whether they live on an alley.
Unlike Minneapolis, where alley plowing is a city service, St. Paul has never plowed its alleys. It's been up to residents to organize their neighbors, collect payments from each household and hire someone to do it for them.
"It's sort of like selling Girl Scout Cookies — you have to make sure everybody pays up." said Kate Mudge, a Hamline-Midway resident and executive director at the Hamline Midway Coalition. "It can be a bit of a fiasco, especially in years like this."
St. Paul's 330 miles of alleys vary from block to block and neighborhood to neighborhood. Some aren't paved, some have steep inclines and some aren't engineered for water drainage. Differences in how they're plowed — if they're plowed at all — have disrupted recycling and garbage collection.
Lynn Hoffman, co-president of Eureka Recycling, said the company would support the city taking over alley plowing. Eureka's drivers have struggled to navigate alleys too icy or narrowed by snow to accommodate a recycling truck, she said.
"It would alleviate a lot of the issues if there was more systematic and consistent salting and plowing in the alleys," she said.
The City Council requested the plowing survey, which is being paid for with $30,000 from the 2019 operating budget. In addition to the online survey, the city mailed paper surveys to a random list of 250 properties located on alleys, said Lisa Hiebert, a spokeswoman for St. Paul Public Works Department.
