City of Kitchener starting to clear what’s left of winter

Crews are already out preparing the city for a beautiful spring season.

“As spring time rolls in, we’re litter-picking along trails, the downtown of course, parks, roadways, anything that’s city owned of course,” says Scott Berry, Operations Manager with the City of Kitchener.
“We do sod restoration, so anywhere where a road plow or a sidewalk plow has damaged any grass, we’ll go and start repairing that. You’ll start to see sand boxes come in and more garbage recepticles go out, things of that nature. So really spring kind of kick starts a whole bunch of activities for us.”

The last remnants of winter will also soon be swept away from the roads, as starting the first week of April, street sweepers will be clearing the roadways.

“Our priorities will be Regional roads, mains and arterial, and then we’ll get into those residential streets shortly after.”

Another pesky problem crews are constantly working on, is potholes.

While it’s hard to do permanent repairs on potholes during the colder seasons, crews are always out working away on them.

“Potholes is one of those seasons that never disappears, so we never really stop doing potholes, but in terms of Spring, we certainly gear up for that, and we’ll put three and four times our regular crews out, just to blitz potholes,” says Berry.

He adds that they encourage residents to report potholes on city streets, by going on the PingStreet app, or calling the Corporate contact centre at 519-741-2345.