Winter is coming, and the City of Saint John will be striving to up its game when it comes to snow removal.

Director of public works Tim O’Reilly told council Monday the city’s winter management plan lays out defined service standards.

“All streets and sidewalks are intended to meet certain conditions within a certain period of time after a snowfall,” O’Reilly said.

But last winter, things didn’t go quite according to plan.

“We were challenged to meet those service standards last winter,” O’Reilly said.

According to data presented to council, during five of the six major snowstorms that hit Saint John last winter, the service standards on sidewalks was only achieved 75 per cent of the time at best.

“This performance was not acceptable to the community,” O’Reilly said. “And frankly it wasn’t acceptable to us either.”

O’Reilly said there was a strong desire to do better this winter, and it inspired the department to plan improvements.

One plan will be to increase the number of sidewalks cleared with street plows rather than sidewalk plows.

“Street plows can plow sidewalks much faster than our smaller sidewalk plows can,” O’Reilly said. “The added bonus is that when we plow sidewalks this way, we eliminate the line of snow that otherwise ends up between the street and sidewalk and sometimes gets pushed back and forth.”

Two major initiatives will help address the problem of vehicles parked on city streets, impeding snowplows.

“Fines for illegal parking are expected to increase significantly,” O’Reilly said, adding details will be presented to council soon.

“We’ll also be turning to our enforcement staff to authorize vehicles to be towed instead of relying on police officers.”

Coun. Gerry Lowe, whose ward includes the south end of the city, said more should be done about vehicles blocking plows.

Lowe said he drove around the south end after a storm last year.

“I probably counted anywhere from 20, 25 cars that were not towed,” Lowe said. “We do nothing, in my opinion, and we do nothing to help the drivers that are driving the plow.”

Additionally, the city is going to conduct an internal audit of the winter management plan.

Coun. Gary Sullivan said the audit was requested by council in the spring after a challenging winter, and will be conducted by the city’s internal audit service along with consultants he said have several years of relevant experience in municipal winter operations.

“Upon approval of this audit, the team will get to work immediately and plan to work throughout the winter season with our transportation and public works department to determine ways to improve our service delivery,” Sullivan said.

Sullivan the consultants won’t just be conducting a fact-finding mission and reporting back to the city in the spring, but there will be ongoing discussions through the winter.

“This is one of those situations where our team, especially in challenging winters, is so busy working in the business it’s hard to find time to work on the business.”