Article content

Mayor Jim Watson took the temperature of the city and now believes a controversial change to residential snow plowing would be “too draconian.”

Watson said Tuesday he won’t support a proposal to hold back plows from residential streets until an extra three centimetres of snow falls. The current standard is seven centimetres, but staff want to increase the threshold to 10 centimetres.

We apologize, but this video has failed to load.

tap here to see other videos from our team. Try refreshing your browser, or Mayor Watson realizes snow-plowing proposal is 'too draconian' Back to video

Just last week Watson called the staff recommendations “reasonable and sensible.”

“From people I’ve heard from and from members of council, they believe that there’s no sense in doing a really good job on arterial roads if you can’t get to the arterial road because your residential street has too much snow on it,” Watson said Tuesday.

“Not to be too critical of staff, but I think the reality is people did not want us to go to that high a count, 10 centimetres, and my hope is that we’ll scale that back to keep it at seven centimetres.”