CENTERVILLE—City officials have decided to get a lot more specific about when property owners residents are required to remove snow from sidewalks around their homes. On March 7 the city council voted to change wording in its ordinance from “a reasonable amount of time” to within 24 hours of the end of a storm. Property owners are required to remove all hail, snow or ice from the entire length of the sidewalk abutting their property – to bare concrete – after a storm or freezing event. It’s against the law to deposit that snow or ice into the gutter or public-right-of-way.

Although some residential areas of the city do not have much of a problem, others are posing a hazard to local residents, Police Chief Paul Child said.

“We have a problem with Parrish Lane on the south side of the road and also around the corner on Main St. where you have a bunch of businesses,” he said. In that area there is no park strip, the plows push snow onto sidewalk and often businesses and apartments don’t clear the snow, he said. “Then we have kids trying to make their way to school and we have these piles of snow on there and now they’re in the street.”

He told the city council of a call the police department recently received from a concerned resident who has a handicapped person in their home. The property owner just below them wasn’t cleaning their sidewalks so the wheelchair-bound person had to go out into the street to pass, he said. “It was making a hazardous situation for this person in a wheelchair.”

Although violation of the ordinance is a Class B misdemeanor, the city has had a policy of informing the resident and give them a chance to rectify the situation, City Attorney Lisa Romney said. After that, a citation can be issued. Most residents comply, she said. All other Davis County cities have a timeframe in their ordinances, Romney said. 

While generally the city does not go out and enforce such ordinances unless there is a complaint, “there are places such as on Parrish and Main where we will enforce without waiting for a complaint,” said City Manager Brant Hanson. “We do have our own corridors that we pay attention to but there are benefits to having it citywide — we don’t know the safe routes to schools, we don’t know those individual circumstances.”

Child said that although officers had never issued a citation, they had talked to several people about this issue. “I think if someone’s out of town and they’re on vacation I think we’re going to be pretty reasonable in how we enforce it.” 

Public Works Director Mike Carlson also expressed his support for the proposed change. “It gives us the bite where we have to [enforce it],” he said. 

City Councilmember George McEwan initially expressed a reluctance to legislate this issue because it is not a concern in some neighborhoods but ultimately voted along with his colleagues in support of the change. City council members requested staff put information in this year’s water bills beginning in November to notify residents of this new requirement. λ