Welcome to business session for January 25th, 2024 AFC Championship Game Edition.

Our first item and apologies to all the Bills fans in the room.

Some of y'all might be from Western New York or something, and uh we feel for you, Melissa.

Uh first item.

It's it's her.

She's from Rochester.

That one.

First item is approval of minutes for business session of January 11, 2024.

Is there a motion?

So moved.

Second.

All in favor indicate by saying aye.

Aye.

Aye.

Okay.

All opposed.

Motion passes.

We are doing what is called a cold weather.

Oh, this is this is gonna be the snow removal or that update, and then we'll do the cold weather plan and a little barrier shelter update.

It's actually all in one pause there.

One love.

We'll uh throw them all together.

All right, please.

So uh good afternoon, City Council.

My name is Melissa Kazakowitz here with me, Director Michael Shaw.

Uh, we're here today to talk about the city's cold weather response over the past few weeks.

As you all know, it has been bitterly cold outside, but we are very proud of the way that the city was able to respond.

Oops, I'm I'm jammed here.

There we go.

So I'll uh kick it over to Director Shaw to talk a little bit about the successes that we've had in this snow and ice removal.

Uh good afternoon, Microsoft Director of Public Works.

Um, yeah, so obviously we know that we've just came into a bitterly cold snap with a lot of snow, and it's about a 14-15 day event that required a lot of work from the teams, and um and really proud to say that the team or your your employees, uh dedicated employees of Kansas City came together and made uh done great on great job under some very stressful situations.

It's it's been very challenging.

We haven't seen an event at this length since um it's been a many years before we've seen an event with this many uh for lasting this long.

So, what did all that uh break out to is we had um obviously about 103 routes is what we do every day or every snow event, and uh we spent over 21,000 man hours working over these last 14, 15 days, uh fighting back the snow and ice.

Um obviously we're at a 24-7 operation behind all of this stuff, so it's it's very, very time consuming.

Um is the big things that we've done since we've actually started taking on this snow and ice uh program.

Uh for those who know that um the way we used to do it versus the way we do it today.

How come is it that much better?

And these are some of the reasons why the things that we do that has been better in years past, or in our former program, what we would do is we would plow essentially you know, during the week or even on the weekends on occasion, but it was just basically during the daylight hours.

There was no residentials out at night, which was a challenge.

Um we also did curb to curb plowing, but that was just relegated to the arterial streets.

We didn't do curb to curb plowing in the neighborhoods, we only did center line plowing in the neighborhoods to create a single path.

And then we didn't do as much pre-treatment as that we do today.

We do a lot more pre-treatment than we had in years past.

Um one of the crazier things, or I guess I call crazy, one of the bigger things is we've actually used technology to really help us do our job more effectively.

And in the past, we used to have paper maps, but obviously we use a significant amount of technology to help us get to where we go so we know we were on the streets, helps people do that better.

And the biggest improvement I believe is it became more of a team effort in the past, it was largely public works, um, but now we have people from multiple departments the health department, the planning department, uh, neighborhoods department, and and all departments come in and participate, even the city manager's office.

Y'all have to find him something else to do because he's there all the time.

Please find him something else to do.

Um and then um our communications plan.

Um, we have a very, you know, we believe a better communication plan than we have in years past.

Uh one of the things that has been very helpful is that we've had our PIO on deck actually over the last couple of events.

We had our PIO and IT has been engaged with us and our snow command center, which makes addressing issues happening real time very much better.

On our communication, obviously, we put out our alert KC.

Uh we have the KCMO app.

Um, obviously a lot of social media, daily website updates.

Um, we have press events, daily updates, and then we actually have a meeting with all these departments every day we have during the event.

All the departments are together on a teams call for at least an hour hating about what's going on and ensuring everybody's on time and on task.

So what we've been able to accomplish is we was able to remove the snow and ice, get it to bare pavement, generally within 24 hours after the event is always our goal.