As winter approaches and the mountains start to see snow, Aurora’s City Council decided Monday that the city will let special districts and HOAs plow their own residential streets this winter.

The city’s current snow removal plan prioritizes public safety access, with residential streets not prioritized for plowing. The new program would allow special district and HOAs to plow residential streets within their boundaries if they follow certain rules.

Lynne Center, the deputy director of public works in Aurora, said the new program would help keep residential area roads from icing over as badly as they did during the winter of 2022 to 2023.

“It snowed regularly there for a little bit but it got cold and it stayed cold for a really long time and that resulted in a lot of ice build up,” Center said in a council study session. “If we had given some of these HOAs and special districts the opportunity to plow their streets, we might have avoided some of that ice buildup.”

City staff began conversations about a process to allow extra plowing in 2019, after the “bomb cyclone” brought extreme blizzard conditions to northeast Colorado. 

From January 2020 through June 2022, the city conducted a city-wide pilot program with the High Plains Metro District serving the Blackstone neighborhood.

When the pilot program ended, staff recommended not moving forward with a city-wide program due to a lack of staff and funds to support the program, according to city council’s meeting agenda package.

Councilmember Francoise Bergan, who sponsored the new resolution, was interested in providing a program and asked staff to find ways to reduce the impacts to staff and funding, according to the package.

In response, they developed the program open to special districts — including metro districts —and established HOAs, allowing them to plow residential streets within their boundaries. The rules they must follow include: 

• Develop a snow removal plan and procedures for city review. The city has an example plan based on their own.
• Use specific equipment and materials determined by the city.
• Provide services at least at the same level as the city would provide.
• Submit monthly season-to-date reports.
• Carry insurance with the city and agree to be responsible for repairing any damages from operations.
• Submit post-season report of each deployment throughout the season.

The city itself has a snow removal plan, but the plan focuses on major roads with the goal of providing public safety access first. 

Aurora splits roads into four priority levels, with priority one roads being arterial roadways, priority two being primarily collector roads to schools and hospitals, priority three being neighborhood connector streets and priority four being main north/south and east/west connector streets. 

The city’s typical route map includes 870 lane miles of priority one roads, according to Center, and a total of 1,505 total lane miles of road prioritized for snow removal. 

During a snow event, plows are deployed to priority one roads until the end of the snowfall or until emergency access is sustained. Once that state is reached, plows are deployed to other routes in order of priority, according to Center. 

In the 2022-23 winter season, the city spent about $1.3 million on snow removal, which was about $3.39 per resident.

The new program will see potential implementation in October 2023, he said,  with the first inter-governmental agreements (IGAs) going to council in November.

Agreements between the city and HOAs or special districts can be executed for periods of one to five years. 

“This is an allowed activity, not a required activity,” Center said. “The districts and HOAs aren’t required to plow their streets, but we’re allowing them to do that.”