Snow, cold prompt warning calls in Elgin
If you've noticed some messages from the City of Elgin on your home voice-mail, you're not alone.
This winter's blistering cold and seemingly weekly heavy snowfalls have prompted city leaders to activate the CodeRed notification system.
With last week's storms and city crews mixing sand with salt to conserve supplies in the Public Works garage, city leaders issued three phone warnings to nearly 20,000 Elgin households.
The three-year-old Code Red system is far from perfect, said Susan Olafson, the city's public information officer.
She noted that the city only can contact homes with listed numbers, the system's mapping software does not contain some newer subdivisions on the city's west side and many homeowners have a privacy block on their home phone that prevents CodeRed from leaving a message.
Still, Olafson said, she's received a lot of positive feedback from the most recent round of calls.
"People, on the whole, were enormously pleased with the alert," she said.
In the past, the city has used the system to alert residents to possible child abduction attempts, hazardous material drills conducted by firefighters, emergency siren testing, temporary parking bans for leaf removal, special trash collections and severe flooding events.
In the system's earlier days, the city also put out messages about relatively routine items such as road projects, but residents didn't like that, Olafson added.
She said city officials still are reviewing the use of CodeRed.
"It could be a great public information resource to communicate anything from emergencies to general information that residents should know," Olafson said.
If you want to be added to or taken off to the CodeRed list, call (847) 931-5592 or e-mail olafson_s@cityofelgin.org.
Leaf me alone:
Elgin city leaders recently spent $103,242 to buy three large vacuums to assist with leaf removal in the spring.
This purchase brings the number of vacuums to six.
"This will double the number we have. It gives us more of a resource to work with for if and when we hit a peak time," said John Loete, public works director.
The purchase does not signal a change in the city's policy of scooping up leaves from city streets, said City Manager Olufemi "Femi" Folarin.
The city is working on a more effective leaf removal plan for fall 2008 after a late leaf drop and early snow left piles of rotting leaves in some neighborhoods until January.
Council members must OK any type of new plan, which could include parking restrictions.
But from a raw numbers standpoint, it seems unlikely the city would shift to vacuuming all its leaves instead of using trucks to push them into a large pile and scoop them up.
Last year, it cost city crews about $30.60 per hour to vacuum up about 2,130 cubic yards of leaves -- but cost only about $16 per hour to push and scoop 13,300 cubic yards of leaves, Olafson said.