City of Kelowna crews using new dashboard tool to track snow removal

On Monday, Kelowna council heard about a new dashboard tool that could one day keep residents updated on snow removal.

Geert Bos, the city’s infrastructure operations department manager, said city staff continue to look for ways to deliver the best possible service while stretching the snow and ice removal budget.

“The team has been working on the creation of a new snow removal dashboard that for each of the snow events will allow staff to determine the service level adherence to council policy,” said Bos.

“This will be the first year that we can actually demonstrate, to the decimal, how many of these routes were actually visited within the allotted time lines.”

Bos explained to the council that the city is broken down into priority one, two and three routes that have specific service level requirements.

Priority one routes are to be cleared within eight hours of a snow event ending while priority two routes will be cleared within 12 hours and priority three routes will be cleared within 48 hours of the end of a snow event.

However, Bos reminded council that priority one routes must be cleared first before city crews move onto other routes.

Bos said the new dashboard would eventually allow the city to look back on weather data and response times which could support in-depth conversations about budgets and performance levels.

“Unfortunately, this dashboard still requires review by a person who has intense knowledge of the events that actually happened,” explained Bos.

The dashboard will be fine tuned in the future to allow for a more automated update in real time.

Mayor Tom Dyas wondered when the dashboard would be accessible by the public and Bos said the city wasn’t quite there yet but is working towards that goal.

“It is an effort that is being actively driven,” stated Bos.

With about five weeks left in the year, the city is expected to use the entire snow and ice removal budget of $2.185 million. To date, about $2 million has been spent.

Councillor Mohini Singh wondered if the remaining amount of funding would be enough to get crews to the end of the year.

“We manage to the best of our ability with what we have,” explained Bos.

He expected the cost to go over the budget this year. However, he said in previous years the city was under budget and leftover money went into a reserve.

Council received this update for informational only and no motions or votes were required.