The Montgomery County Council will hold a hearing Feb. 9 to review the county’s response to last weekend’s record snowstorm.
Council President Nancy Floreen said Thursday the full council will hear county officials present their “preliminary thoughts” about their preparation and response to the storm that brought more than two feet of snow to most of the county.
“We’ll be asking our county people about what they could’ve done better. Could they have done anything better? Did we have an adequate amount of support on hand to help us with the work?” Floreen said.
In an email to constituents Thursday afternoon, council member Roger Berliner outlined nine topics he wants to see addressed at the hearing, including whether the county should provide “realistic time estimates at the front end” when it comes to snow plowing instead of “the standard ‘this will be a multi-day effort’ response.”
Berliner wrote he’ll also ask about why the county’s snow operations map was “so unhelpful and the cause of even greater stress.”
Many residents complained the map showed neighborhood streets as “in progress” for county plow crews, but that plow crews weren’t actually in their neighborhoods.
“What would it take to be able to track each and every plow with GPS in order to improve communications and efficiency?” Berliner wrote in his email.
Floreen said the county’s 311 phone information system, which on Tuesday morning received a record number of calls leading to long wait times, will be a topic at the meeting. So will the snow removal map.
“While it may have offered some folks hope, it didn’t offer people the clarity that they hoped to have and so those people became pretty frustrated,” Floreen told Bethesda Beat. “So the question is, is it worth doing? Is it possible to deliver that information in a timely fashion or not?”
On Wednesday, county spokesman Patrick Lacefield said the county is open to making improvements to the map.
Berliner wrote that he received hundreds of emails from residents during the storm and in its immediate aftermath.
“Most of those communications conveyed tremendous frustration and many questions about the manner in which our county performed the important responsibility of clearing our roads,” Berliner wrote.
Floreen said she received messages from frustrated residents. But she said she also received a larger than normal number of messages from residents complimenting the job the county did clearing snow.
She said the top concern of residents Thursday is the condition of state roads. Some had lanes that remained full of snow, reducing major commuting routes such as Rockville Pike and River Road to two lanes in some stretches.
“Part of the issue is the interrelationship between the county operations and state operations. Right now, we’re besieged by complaints about [Rockville Pike]. Well, that’s really a state issue,” Floreen said. “But it’s hard to explain that to people. People can get confused about who’s in charge of what, quite naturally.”
