For the second time in as many months, Denver’s citizens – and, more important for the mayor and other city officials, its voters – are angry.
Residents claim that many streets have yet to see a snow plow and remain coated with a several-inch-thick compaction of snow and ice or an even thicker gruel of slush and snow crystals. On other streets, many parked cars are blocked in by mounds of ice piled up by the plows that have managed to make it to the neighborhood. Sidewalks are treacherous and many elderly and handicapped citizens are essentially still snowbound in their homes because of the difficult pedestrian and driving conditions.
Alleys can be impassable altogether, foreclosing recycling and garbage collection for whole neighborhoods. Now, one week after the big blizzard, another storm is pummeling us.
Citizens and voters have a right to be frustrated. The snow-clearing efforts do appear to have been poorly managed and officials were slow to respond to the severity of the last storm. It might seem that just a month after the election fiasco, city officials have again been caught with their proverbial pants down.
It would be comforting to have someone to blame. But it would be wrong and essentially miss the realities that lay behind Denver’s existing snow-removal plans and the sound decisions that lay behind them.
When I moved to Denver four years ago, I was shocked to learn that the city had fewer plows per mile than cities like Chicago, Pittsburgh, New York and Detroit – despite averaging more snow each year than they do. But I soon learned that Denver’s policy made sense.
In the course I teach, Public Policy Analysis, I instruct my students in the fine points of “decision analysis.” We ask students to estimate the costs and benefits of different decisions and to estimate the probabilities of different consequences that can result from any particular decision.
For instance, the city can decide whether to take out insurance to cover the costs of individuals who are injured as a result of city negligence or a city employee’s actions. Or the city can avoid paying yearly insurance premiums by paying legitimate claims from the city treasury.
It may be that the cheapest and wisest course for the city is to pay out claims from the treasury rather than to take out insurance each year because it expects the annual payouts over time to be less than the annual costs of insurance premiums. But the city could pay more in claims than it would have for insurance if it faces an unexpectedly large amount of claims. In other words, the city chooses the policy with the lowest expected costs but unluckily ends up paying more because the unexpected costliest outcome occurred.
So, too, with a large investment in snow plows and similar equipment.
December, January and February are some of our driest months. Most of the snow in Denver tends to fall in the months of October, November, March and April, when the days are sunny and warm. In contrast, the Northeast cities we compare to, such as New York and Pittsburgh, get most their snow in the coldest months of January and February.
Hence, even though we average more snow, ours will typically melt away in a matter of days while theirs can remain on the ground for months. So even large snowfalls such as the big blizzard of 2003 can clear up in less than a week without a snow plow ever visiting your neighborhood.
For many years, Denver’s policy has served it well, and the city has avoided investing in expensive snowplow equipment that will typically lie idle year after year. As a result, the city has kept taxes lower than similar urban jurisdictions and devoted its resources to areas such as public safety, social services and education.
What happened recently was rare on two counts: We got one of the largest snow falls ever – a storm that typically occurs once every five to 10 years – and we received this snow in the colder and usually drier month of December, when the daytime sun and temperatures have limited ability to thaw what is on the ground.
Of course, the difficulties in subsequently clearing streets and sidewalks have cost hundreds of thousands of dollars in school and business closings, in delayed deliveries, and in a sharp dropoff in customer traffic at local stores. In hindsight, spending millions to have the capacity on hand to keep everything clear might have been cost-effective. But the outcome, while expensive, was an extremely low-probability event.
City officials gambled that we would be spared such a rare outcome. But as frustrated as we all are now, we shouldn’t blame our leaders for having made an educated and wise choice – which turned out to be wrong only because the least likely outcome actually came to pass.
Gabriel E. Kaplan is an assistant professor of public policy at the Graduate School of Public Affairs at the University of Colorado.
