Your Tax Dollars at Work

We've gotten some snow here in Cake Eater land over the past couple of days.

Starting on Friday night, we received some sort of precipitation that resembled a slurpee. That froze solid on Saturday afternoon, when the temperature dropped quite quickly after another inch of the white fluffy stuff covered it over. On Sunday, we received about four inches when the tail end of the blizzard that hit Wisconsin rather badly sideswiped us. Yesterday, we received another few inches, and this morning, it's snowing lightly and is supposed to stop in the next hour or so. Reportedly, on Friday we're to get another one to three inches.

The only reason I mention this precipitation pattern is to note that I'm really sick and tired of the snow plow drivers only showing up for overtime hours. As in, the plows are all over the roads late at night, but if you need them to be running at any time during the day, well, that's a crapshoot. The Cake Eater pad resides on a fairly busy road, which is managed by Hennepin County. Across the street, in the Province of Minneapolis, the streets, per usual, have barely been cleaned off at all. Our back alley is taken care of by the Cake Eater City crews, and they've been on the ball---and I've got no issues with them. (They even plow the sidewalk in front of my house, because the plows dump their stuff there and they wisely realize that no mere mortal snowblower could work its way through that crap.) But it appears as if the Hennepin County and City of Minneapolis crews would prefer to make sure they're making as much money per hour of snowplow driving as possible, whilst the roads become completely unmanageable in the meantime. This is not to say I haven't seen crews from my perch, here in the Cake Eater pad, during the day, but they are far and few between during that time period, whereas during the evening, they're all over the place. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to realize what's going on here. Mr. H. reports a similar situation within Ramsey county, where he lives.

I suspect, if the snow keeps up in this fashion, the county and Minneapolis will be announcing sometime in early February, if not sooner, that they've run entirely out of money for snow removal and will come begging to the state for assistance. Of course, when they go a-begging to the legislature, I'm certain they will not mention that their drivers only seem to show up for work when they're getting paid double for their services.