Charlie Chong Gets Snowed By City Hall

Snow comes or it doesn't.

Mostly, around here it doesn't, which is why, mostly, we don't know what to do when it does.

I've always bought into the basic notion that governs Seattle snowstorm policy: If it snows, tough. The city has been willing to spend what it takes to combat almost every man-made obstacle to perfect human existence - from homelessness to the Green Lake path - but we leave snow alone.

One thing you can absolutely count on here is rain, which melts snow, so the city saved itself the expense of owning any more than the most minimal amount of snow-removal equipment - 11 plow blades at last count.

This year was different, and not because nobody could identify a single street that was plowed anywhere in town. This storm was different because it produced a relatively inexpensive proposal to deal with some of the unplowed snow.

New City Councilman Charlie Chong, he of the wispy beard and steely spine, received complaints from people who couldn't get around in the snow. He proposed the city - fasten your seat belts, this is radical - look into buying more plow blades, which would be attached to city trucks to plow snow. He contemplated spending maybe $100,000 to double the city's plowing capacity.

After he announced this, he received a call from Leonard Sutter in Issaquah. Sutter last summer bought at auction seven snowplow blades retired from service by King County. Sutter said he'd be happy to give the city a deal.

The plow blades sell for about $10,000 new. He'd let them go for, oh, $1,000 each. This was not as generous as it seems since he only paid $50 apiece, but he was willing to be flexible, he said. Finding the used plow blades seemed like a stroke of great good luck to Chong. He contacted city traffic engineers, who inspected the plow blades.

They reported that five of the seven were in good shape, which raises the question why King County got rid of them. Kathy Brown, a county transportation manager, said the plow blades "had reached the end of their life cycle," as determined by the county's masters of fleet administration.

This life cycle is strictly a matter of age, not use. The plow blades could well have been in mint condition, but because they had been around a set number of years, county policy dictated they be replaced. Thus, the auction. The city of Seattle, by the way, could have bought the plow blades at auction probably for not much more than the $50 Sutter paid, but they weren't in the snowplow business until Chong happened along.

Chong proposed buying the plows and making the necessary modifications of city trucks to mount them. When he introduced the resolution last week, the council - some of whose members still felt the sting of Chong's campaign criticisms - taught the new kid a lesson. Under the theory that Chong was bypassing ordinary city-purchasing procedures, the council sent the proposal off to have its ethics examined to make sure no Chong relatives would prosper from the deal.

Those relatives live mainly in Hawaii, Chong said, and so far as he knew none of them sold snowplows. The ethics report came back clean, and Chong reintroduced the proposal this week. Now, however, the transportation department has decided it doesn't really want the plows after all.

The department says if it plows streets it wants to sand them, too, and the sand trucks they own would weigh too much with the plows attached. Why plowed but unsanded streets are worse than the current unplowed streets is a mystery to me. But the department is shunning the plows, recommending instead:

"If the Council chooses to enhance the City's snow response equipment at this time, but also desires an ongoing benefit, we recommend purchase of a hotbox truck (for pothole patching) with used plow and sander for $138,000 with an annual lease cost of $26,000. While the improvement in snow response is more modest, it provides year round benefit and will help minimize future damage to city streets."

In other words, the engineers would prefer to spend 10 times as much to buy one-fifth the plowing capacity. Charlie's knee-deep in something, but I don't think it's snow.

Terry McDermott's column appears Tuesday and Thursday. His phone message number is 515-5055. His e-mail address is: tmcd-new@seatimes.com