Welcome to Bismarck Insights with Mayor Mike Schmitz, a transparent and engaging conversational dive into meaningful topics impacting local government in Bismarck, North Dakota. Bismarck Insights is dedicated to removing barriers between the city of Bismarck and the citizens we serve every day. Welcome to Bismarck Insights. I'm Mike Schmitz, Mayor of Bismarck, and today we have a focus on roads and streets. I have with me Chad Schumeister, and he is the assistant superintendent of roads and streets and We thought we'd probably have snow this past winter, um. Didn't have a lot, so but there's a lot of things that roll the streets crews do besides snow removal, but let's just talk about snow removal briefly. What, what's the process for the city of Bismarck Chad? And uh, I should actually ask what brought you to the city of Bismarck first? Um, I, I guess I applied back in 2006 and uh everybody had told me it was a good place to work. I knew some families, parents or dads that worked here, and I got on and it's been on ever since. It's a great family to work with and. Um, I just enjoy it and my grandfather always said that if you enjoy going to work, it's really not work, so yeah, that's why I'm still here. That's good. So let's talk a little bit about what the process is snow removal, we didn't have a lot. We may still have snow. It's, it's only, you know, March, and I remember April's with snow. So, um, what, what is the. Process and the determination of when we see the removal will occur versus maybe sanding and so forth. Yes, so we'll go out and sand and salt anything up to 2 inches after we accumulate 2 inches, which we usually try to figure out by calling NOAA out of the airport. And we go off of their measurements if they say we got 2 inches, then we'll bring our crews in and we'll start on our snow emergency routes. Um, we'll work on them until they're cleared out and if it still keeps snowing, we'll just stay on them until they're they stay clear for emergency personnel. And then we have routes throughout the community that are cleared, but they're on a rotational basis. So let's talk about that a little bit what because everybody. Wants to know why their streets aren't clean, right? So after our emergency routes, we have our secondaries which are schools and in our, uh, arterial routes. Those are also done right after emergency routes before we get into our priority residential areas, which is 4 inches or more. Um, when we go into that, if we start in a specific we have 7 units in the city. Each unit is combined of 4 operators that they could switch back and forth on shifts with. Um, when they do start an area, and I'm just gonna use this as an example because it's my unit that I plowed, um, 19th century, there's, uh, Pebble Creek there. If I started there first on this snow event, I would likely end there last the next time, so we'd rotate so the next time I do, I'd just move north and start out at the point. And then I just moved away, you know, to the west and start that way and circle back around. Uh, most guys are and most people know that they're supposed to rotate. However, there are sometimes where in a snow event we might have more wind and snow in that northwest corner of town and it blocks a lot of areas. So we may end up having a few more people up in that area helping get the. Open faster for people to get out. So the point is, once no event you might be first, next one you might be last. You could be somewhere in between too because we do try to rotate through the city to make sure we try to treat everybody as, as fair as possible, but knowing there are certain areas of the community where there's wind and maybe there's something that's causing drifting. Because we had a big snow event earlier that we got big piles and if we have to make sure we keep those roads open and 4 inches doesn't necessarily shut down our road is right OK. Um, we talked a lot about snow gates in the past and we certainly use snow gates. What's the, what's the level when snow gates are used or maybe even better yet most functional. So there's, they're supposed to be used at all times. Um, we use them at all times, we try to, um, also people uh may understand and may not. You're working on a 3rd 12 hour shift, a person may get tired here and there. You may forget a driveway here and there. It's not like we purposely do it. It's just you get, you're gonna, you know, not fall asleep. You're gonna forget things here and there. So we do try to use them all the time. The only time we do not use them is if a snow emergency is declared by yourself or commission or whoever does that, um, and then we would. Then we wouldn't have to use them, but we still use them then because when we go to intersections, we don't want a, a, a speed bump in the intersections, so we're still gonna use them to clear that out of there. It's just that we wouldn't necessarily have to use them at driveways. They probably work the best where there's gonna be nothing left in the driveway at 4 to 6 inches. Anything above 6 inches, you're gonna get some sort of snow in your apron at the bottom, some sort. So again we didn't have a lot of snow this year yet, but there's a lot of things your crew does your team members do throughout the year. What are some of those things? So we'll pot we'll patch potholes, um, and maintain the city streets is what our job is to do yearly, um, obviously we can't do no painting of parking spots and stuff like that, but we do that when it's nicer, but a lot of the stuff that we've been doing is is out filling potholes the best we can and. And maintaining them and watching them so if they blow out again, which this time of year you could feel it today and tomorrow it's gonna be gone because the moisture, the, the frost is coming out and you get a little bit of water going with it and it pops them out so we could be back and forth in there every day fixing them, um, this winter, thankfully I think we've had about 9 new people in the last 8 months and that's a lot, um. We've been doing a lot of training, so if they, if people say, why are they all plowing it's a waste of city money it's really not because that's our training for them in the past when we've had a lot of snow and you're new, you didn't get that kind of training. You got thrown in it and you went and you did your job, so we took a lot of time to train this year, a lot of, a lot of sanding and, and stuff like that and a lot of, um, areas where we hauled snow because some people never hauled snow before. So they never drove up to a blower and if you're a farm kid it's kind of like driving a silage truck you're shooting silage into it so you just kinda stay beside it and go, um, so we did a lot of training that way this year. Which is important because when that major event comes we wanna make sure our team members are are well trained but it's also important to understand for citizens yes we we employ a crew year round and we have to have them available. So that's why we find other things to do and maintaining streets is, is a year-round function, um, so like during the summer. You're not going and doing a complete rebuild of the street, but you may still be going to several areas in the community to do smaller repair jobs, yeah, we'll go and we have our own backhoe, um, rubber tire backhoe. We'll go into areas and if it's really alligated and really bad and, and, uh, engineering gonna do a project for, for a year or two, it's our job to maintain it so we'll go there and dig that piece out if it's got some, uh, muckier stuff underneath that, we'll dig that out and put a gravel base underneath there so it lasts the next year or two. And we'll, we'll go in and put payment in there and roll it out and do what we can. And is your crew also part of the group that cleans the streets? Absolutely. And we got a head start this year if, if people notice we were kind of probably out in areas and that we probably wouldn't be until mid April. So, um, we got a good start on it. We're gonna focus on starting our city wide sweeping here, um, Monday. The following week we used to do some double shift sweeping so we'd start at 5:30 in the morning and go till 2 and then 1:30 till 10 at night. We're gonna go back to that the week of the 24th for two weeks to see how much we can get done. So, um, we, as soon as we get that done, then the next thing we could do is go into our crack ceiling and try to prevent any other kind of damage to the road. So we'll, we'll get out there and try to do as much as we can. And that's an important function, the maintaining of the roads, uh, you know, ceiling cracks or, or taking care of potholes by doing that it's helping extend the life so that we don't have to go in and do a complete rebuild, which is where special assessments come for people, uh, so this is, this is a function of our general operations, uh, the, the street crew of public works take care of, um, when, when we get into that major snow event, I'm gonna back up a little bit. Um, because I've had conversations with, with Steve Solway, the director of public works, uh, you don't always only get to use your own people, so we're not sometimes you have to borrow from other departments, correct? And, and who is that that we're borrowing from? So our forestry department helps us out a lot and our landfill helps us out a lot with their operator too. Um, the city has grown so much in 20 years that I've been there that we've still only had 7 units and we need to expand our units because we don't have enough to cover all the roads. Um, I think we got roughly 1,400 1500 lane miles that we plow, so I think it's like 380 center lane miles. That's a lot. And back 20 years ago, I don't know what we had. I'd have to look, but we've grown a lot and the new developments for us to get out there as fast as everybody expects it to be with only 30 some people, 34, 35 people, it's hard to do, right? That's why we we cross utilize our team members because also we probably couldn't employ or keep them busy. Year round and when we have those major events, you know, to add 10 more people do we have enough work for them year round? Probably not. That's, that's the important part of sharing, uh, that, that team across that and you probably help them out too at times. Oh yeah, yeah, we hope the forestry and well clean up weeks coming up here in April. Uh, we will send pretty much every one of our guys out there to help with the landfill or clean up week. We'll send loaders and and and trucks around to clean up the heavy stuff and yeah. So In your role you mentioned we've got some new people we've had some retirements, correct? or just other depart departures for other reasons. People got better jobs, but how do you feel the staffing is right now with, I mean, knowing what the kind of the budgeted numbers are and so forth for expected staff, right? I, I think we, I think we are doing OK. Um, like I said, it would be nice if we had enough to expand another unit, which we're, I know Steve is working on. Um, we have 3 current openings which we hired yesterday, and typically we don't hire anybody without a CDL because at the CD for us to operate equipment you need a commercial license. Um, yesterday is the first time in 20 years that I've been there that we interviewed people without it because we're just not getting nobody to apply. Nobody wants to come and work for, I think our starting pay is 2675. Um, you can, you're getting paid more than that at private sector and you don't need that commercial license. With that commercial license also now they passed a few years back that you have to take a schooling for it. Well, that's like $6000 at BSC. Most people that kids that are coming out of high school don't have that money to pay for that. So we kind of looked at it a different way and see if we can't bring some people in if they got a good attitude, they have a good work ethic and stuff like that and see if we can help them with that CDL and then help them bring that on with us and hopefully they'd stay with us. So, so we'll help with the training process and get them through. The schooling and hopefully get them licensed with their CDL in the interim when they don't have their CDL, what do we, what can we have them do? They're gonna be shoveling and they'll be riding in a pickup with somebody, yeah, so every, every piece of everything we operate, you need a commercial license for other than a pickup. So when we do go out and pave, you're gonna have, you know, a couple extra guys that are gonna need to shovel and rake and stuff like that. So that's what they'll be doing for a while and. And uh we're gonna try to encourage them to get that permit as soon as possible um and hopefully that license within 6 months we have our own uh instructor that's that's certified to do that so um it's just gonna be our time and our training that'll be that'll be into it so so as we look towards the summer, um, what are some of the things that you know are kind of on the plan. For your crew to take care of, I mean, I realize there's things are gonna come up we don't know about, but we probably have a plan of where we're gonna maybe attack some streets to put some maintenance into them. Do you have, can you share any of that? Yeah, absolutely. We're, we're, uh, we're in cracks still which we. We've already started to do some of that. Um, we're gonna go into crack ceiling stuff that was that were projects done the last two years. Um, that's when you start seeing the cracks and then that's when engineering won't have nobody come back and do anything on that. So we'll do the maintenance on that from there on out, um, then we'll do some, uh, Steve bought us a mastic machine, um, it's kind of like, uh, uh, you could fill cracks with it plus it's got stuff where you could put holes you could fill holes with it, so we did an area last year that we thought worked great. Um, it had depression cracks and as cars would go over they, you know, feel at home. We went in there and filled all them and, and the the residents in that area called and said thank you because it's such a smoother ride now. So we're gonna go out and do that in areas that were scrub seals prior to this year as well so we can try to take that, make it a smoother ride for residents and people that are traveling in them areas. And so, so residents want to know when the timeline might be if they were, had a scrub seal or something like that done maybe two summers ago. Is that right? Probably might be you might see someone coming in from our actually city crews, um, and, and knowing that we're just going in to try to maintain those streets and preserve life, and that's gonna come in obviously budget reasons if as long as we have the funds and and stuff to do that we're gonna, we're gonna do whatever we can with the resources and tools we have to make the streets better for people to drive OK. And how do you feel about your crew that you've, you know, that that's hired now? Are they, you, you're comfortable with what their capacities are and capabilities? Yeah, they're all learning yet. I mean, obviously if you look back. When I got started 20 years ago, a lot of them people, we did things different because technology today is better, um, and they were used to doing things a certain way, but a lot of them have retired and moved on and stuff like that, so we have to adapt to, um, the changing of the of of things in the world and in technology so the guys we got in now a lot of them are. You know, younger, a little bit, you know, and they're not afraid to work, so it's great to have them, you know, they, they, they got a good share of them have good work ethic, of course you still have a couple that are Debbie Downer, but you work with them and you try to encourage them to, you know, be happy about things and so. So 20 years, what has changed? Technology has changed um back in you know 20 years ago our Sanders all had just a lever you couldn't really tell nothing we didn't have brine with them um now everything's push button and it's all computerized, um, we, we have to calibrate them back then you didn't you just turned a dial and you put down what you thought and you could see it, you know, nowadays if. Um, you gotta sometimes you don't even know if you're actually applying material on the back because it's, you're not putting enough down so the calibration of the trucks is important and we have, um, we do that every fall before we get into doing our, our winter stuff and, uh, with that as well as we talked about trading earlier we hold a rodeo, an equipment rodeo out at at our landfill area where we we invite Burley County, Morton County, and, and the city of Manden and stuff like that, typically not the DOT because they don't usually run the equipment we do. So we have an equipment rodeo where we make it a competition. We set up some courses and people run through that and it's a good training because they don't sit in that stuff for six months. So when you get back in there, it's a good spot for them to sit in there and, and, uh, get familiarized to begin with it. Sure you brought up something just now brine, which is a that's more like a pre-treatment, isn't it to for ice or do we do some pre-treatment? We do. You can use it for both, um. It it it basically what it's there it's to prevent a bond. It's to prevent that ice from bonding to the roadway. So when we do go back and plow it, it pops off easier. Um, yeah, there's times that we go out and wheel ruts are there and there's still some stuff inside there we'll go out and try to get that off and we'll use that brine to apply it and we might chase it with a little bit of salt to get it to melt and and stuff like that. But yeah, we use it for pretreating we use it for, um, you know, trying to. Get the stuff off the roadway and we use it in all of our sanders. We have, uh, saddle tanks on each one and that's applied with it. What that does is help that stuff stick to the roadway and so so we have less hopefully less slippery accident type opportunities. So as we look into 2026, what are some of the things that you feel we should be looking to try to have that will help you and your crew? Well, I, I know it's difficult to do with the pay, but that's if we could get enough people in. That were experienced operators that could get decent pay, um, I know that's always a tough thing too because if you bring in people, um, even on a wage right now you bring in people that have been here 4 or 5 years and it's only 10 cents, 20 cents less than what they're making it doesn't good, it doesn't work well with the morale so how to, how to improve that is difficult for you as a mayor and the commissioners to do. I understand that. But for us to do um what we need to do we need to have the proper tools and resources and and right now I think we got all that it's just if we can expand our team a little bit wider and our units to get things done faster for people. And that would be one of the challenges you probably see going into the future, um. As the city continues to grow. This might be a difficult question to answer because you don't really know, but When is it gonna be necessary that we need to create another route for snow removal principally. Um, probably 5 years ago, no, but yeah, moving forward, as soon as, the sooner the better for us because like you get calls, everybody gets calls like they're not here yet. They haven't done this. You read it on Facebook. Well, they haven't done our street. They, they can't be out there working. That's the thing if they don't, if we're in our other areas of town and working, you're not gonna see another unit out somewhere where if we keep moving north and east like we're moving. And just north and west we're gonna need another unit to get started in some other areas and with the landfill having their loader and their blade that helps us. Sure, so, but that's and, and I asked that question not so much that I, as mayor don't understand this, but so, so our residents understand that we're trying to be as foodish surely wise as we can be, but there's going to be a point in time where because the city has grown we may well have to find a way to create a whole another crew which is. As you stated, it's probably 8 members to be able to. Run 24/7 or close to 24/7 with uh with that crew and another so if we go from 7 to 8 that's really what it's gonna mean or if we wanna be quicker to get snow removed um with how we do that and, and think outside the box equipment's not gonna move really faster you know you can only go so fast, so gotta do it in a safely manner so nobody gets hurt, yeah, and, and we wanna make sure we protect the residents who are driving who are. Passing through passing through in any way, shape or form, pedestrians and so forth. So any other challenges that you see, uh, from your perspective for roads and streets in the city of Bismarck? No, you know, it's, it's always a challenge just because some things that come up new and we have such green people, you know, fairly new people, um. Just time is what we need to get them people trained and and moving up so the more that we can do training and and people understand that we're a maintenance department we're not gonna go out and just completely fix that and be done with it and it's never gonna be better but we maintain it to to get it to stay where. To hold up until a project can be taken care of, done it so on a wider scale basis because we typically as a city we don't like to go in and just repair a block, it's not very cost effective for the residents on that block. certainly isn't cost effective for the city as well because there's just a mobilization cost and to get a crew from outside because again this the street department doesn't go in and do the mill and overlay or or even a complete sub-base reconstruction. That's done by a contractor and they don't like to come in. Well, they'll come in. But they're not, it's not very cost effective for us, um. This, you know, from a job satisfaction standpoint, once we get someone working for us and, and they're comfortable with pay, which obviously is always a concern, but do you feel like we have a good environment for them culturally? They have good satisfaction from their job? I think as I don't. Think I'd be here 20 years later if I didn't think it was a good place to work and if the environment wasn't, you know, good um everybody is a little bit different and and uh I think a lot of the younger people that don't really care about the insurance don't care about that they want the money but if you wanna start a family and you need the insurance it's it's a great place to work and like I said if if you love doing your job it's really not a job so. So I, I don't have a lot of other questions. Do you have any questions for me? No, I don't have any questions. I was, uh, maybe bring it back to snow removal. I remember when Steve S we started here we did a, a comparison, um, him and I. The city of Hazen was bragging about how fast they clean their their streets and so Steve went in he's a numbers guy and he figured out exactly how many people they needed to do that street and then he did a comparison to ours. We had 34 people and we would need 53 to do what they did in that shorter time. So it it's kind of if you look at some things that way, how much people wanna get things done faster, you know it's, it's a eye opener. I know something else that uh Steve looked at. Probably as a result of the first year he was working as the director for public works is like downtown, snow removal and and the snow piling into the sidewalks there and how could we do that to keep the sidewalks open and uh I think there were some solutions attempted to. Try to pull the the snow to the middle of the street, yeah. How, how did that go, do you think this year we didn't get to try a whole lot because we didn't have that big snowfall event. um, I think if we got that. 8 inches or more and we pulled it it'd be great we did do it We got the approval from you and and your commission to to on Main Street. pull it from I think 6th Street, uh, west and we did do it. It was great. We were back in that night and we hold it off and maybe disrupted traffic a little bit during the day that day, but other than that they were great. And, and I think it probably helped the businesses out who have sidewalks in front of them and a they didn't have to go out and try to remove the snow, um, but it also allowed the pedestrian traffic to move. A little more freely through downtown Bismarck, yeah, yeah, and, and there too, like Steve, he's like, well, let's try to move some skitters down there and push the snow out a little bit further because, you know, we go in there and take our gates off our motor grader blades and we try to pull that stuff off as far as, you know, much as we can, but we, we went ahead with some, uh, with our tool cat and a and a skitter and tried to push out as much as we could so we could get a lot of that out of there. I don't know if if a person could work with the the contractors that do it so they can just push it out a little bit further for us or not. I don't know how that would work but um that would be great. So, so again, Chad, thank you for joining me today. um, thank you for sharing a little bit of information about uh streets in the city of Bismarck and and the things you do and, and, uh, certainly everybody probably notices the snow removal more so than the rest of it, but honestly if we don't take care of the maintenance of the streets. Uh, we have a bigger issue and, and that's a very actually in my opinion, a significantly critical component of your, your team's work. So thank you for joining me. Yeah, thank you for having me. Thank you for watching Bismarck Insights with Mayor Mike Schmitz. If you have specific topics or questions you'd like addressed in future episodes, email M Schmitz at BismarckndD.gov. Or call the City of Bismarck at 701-355-1300. To learn more about the city of Bismarck, visit bizarndD.gov or follow us on a variety of social media channels by searching Bismarck NDgov. Bismarck Insights is a collaboration between Dakota Media Access and the City of Bismarck. 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