Jersey City to Start Ticketing Residents Who Shovel Snow into Streets
By Jon Whiten • Dec 28th, 2010 • Category: Blog, News
As Jersey City continues to try to dig out from Sunday’s massive snowstorm and plow the city’s streets, city officials say they will begin ticketing any residents who shovel snow into the street after it has been plowed. Doing so is a violation of city law, which requires all residents to pile shoveled snow against the curb line instead. City inspectors will begin ticketing residents for this violation at 1 pm today.
“After a snowstorm, no person shall shovel, throw or deposit any snow or ice from any sidewalk or gutter into the street after it has been plowed and opened up by city snow removal apparatus and personnel for vehicular traffic,” the relevant ordinance reads. “Any person finding it necessary to clear a sidewalk or gutter, after said street has been opened for vehicular traffic, shall bank and pile the snow from the sidewalk within three feet inside the curb.”
City spokesperson Jennifer Morrill says the city is just trying to get the message across that shoveling snow back into a plowed street only slows down the digging out progress in the rest of the city.
“We’re trying to deter people from throwing more snow back into the street that we’ve just cleaned,” she says. “If everybody did that, [the cleanup effort] would be back to square one.”
She says the city is not yet issuing summonses for properties that haven’t cleared their sidewalks, since not every property owner has been able to get to his or her property, given the state of the roads, which she says is improving.
The city is still receiving plenty of reports and phone calls today of streets that have not yet been plowed, but Morrill says they are getting to more and more of them, and now that the Department of Public Works is helping out the Jersey City Incinerator Authority with the plowing, even more streets are expected to be cleared.
While Morrill acknowledges that many city residents are frustrated by the pace of the cleanup, she hopes that everyone will bear with them as they continue to work.
“We’re just asking everyone to have patience as the city tries to clear this mess,” she says.
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Jon Whiten is the founding editor of the Jersey City Independent; he now works for a public-policy nonprofit in Trenton.
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