An Open Letter To My City

Dear Tosa,

You have been located in the fine state of Wisconsin for over 170 years, so by now, the weather patterns of this area should not come as a surprise. But while I have become accustomed to the lack of urgency the city places on snow plowing, your behavior after this last snowfall is unacceptable.

I understand that while packed into a major metropolitan area, the city size and budget restraints do have their limits. While it is disheartening to see that neighboring cities ( including the exponentially larger Milwaukee ) seem to get a head start on their plowing activities, I have let that slide, knowing that eventually you will get the job done. I do not know the extent of the budget, but perhaps you have chosen to have a few extra police officers, instead of an extra snowplow, thus slowing down the snow removal process. This I am okay with.

But I'd like an explanation as to what happened this past weekend. While there are many disadvantages to living on the same street as a school ( traffic, parking, running over little kids ), one of the perks is that my street is usually one of the first to be taken care of in a snow storm. This weekend was no exception, which I was happy to see.

Happy to see that is, until I noticed that my fine city has decided to NOT plow the WHOLE street. Why on earth would you only plow a swatch right down the middle of the street? Did we run into budget problems that I don't know about? Was there not enough salt to cover all the streets? ( for those of you reading that aren't from Tosa - I'm not kidding. They've left 8 feet of snow on the streets next to the curbs on both sides of the street ) The plow did come by my house twice, once in each direction. I know this, because I was outside making snowmen at the time.

So I guess my question is two-fold. One, why was this done? And two, what do we do about it now? Since the temperatures have dropped to unacceptable levels, the snow you left on the street has now frozen into a six inch thick, eight foot wide solid ice block on both sides of the street. Thank you for that.

Last time I wrote about you guys, the flickering street light outside my house was fixed the next day. I'd like this taken care of in a timely fashion as well.

Kthxbye.