After an avalanche of complaints over clogged streets and icy sidewalks, Toronto city staff are taking a hard look at expanding sidewalk snowplowing to downtown even though this year’s budget might be blown.

Transportation general manager Barbara Gray, taking questions Monday on the city’s snow woes from members of Mayor John Tory’s executive committee, noted the disparity of the city doing sidewalk clearing in most neighbourhoods around the city core, but leaving downtown residential sidewalks to homeowners.

“I think a critical piece of this review is going to look at harmonizing service citywide,” Gray said of a Tory-requested look at snow removal service levels, adding that some discontent since a late January snowstorm relates to the different levels of city service in different parts of Toronto.

“So we’re going ... to try to get to harmonized service.”

The city currently plows about 5,900 kilometres of the 7,000 kilometres, and has usually explained the disparity by saying narrower downtown sidewalks make mechanical plowing more difficult.

After Mayor John Tory took office in late 2014, the city’s winter maintenance budget grew from $76.44 million to $88.34 million in 2016, and then shrank and is proposed at $87.45 million this year.

Gray suggested her department is reviewing the past three years of snow removal spending, managed “according to the weather, which has been reasonably mild in the last few years.

“So this year the budget of $87.45 million will be somewhat challenged by the fact that we’ve just done some snow removal but we’re trying to get those costs as close to the budgeted amount as possible.”

About 90 per cent of the city’s snow removal and salting is contracted out. That figure rose from about 75 per cent in 2012 when then-mayor Rob Ford convinced council to do more outsourcing to save money.

On Monday CUPE Local 416 wrote to city council that “recent weather events have brought to light gaps in services that have resulted in significant delays in the clearing of streets and sidewalks.”

“Unfortunately, current private service providers are not meeting the expectations of Toronto residents when it comes to transportation services,” the union local said, offering to talk to the city about having more city staff do snow clearing, salting and road maintenance, rather than acting as a “safety net” for the public when contractors fail to meet service standards.

Tory and his executive voted to talk to Local 416 “regarding opportunities to improve efficiency and quality of service through in-sourcing where appropriate, and include these findings in the report to the executive committee on this review in 2019.”

Gray said she expects to report back to executive on interim findings in May.

City officials are not wrong when blaming this winter’s nasty weather as a major impediment to its cleanup efforts, said David Phillips, senior climatologist at Environment Canada. Since the start of the year, Toronto experienced 112 centimetres of snow, way above the norm of 55 centimetres for that two-month stretch; and, already surpassing the 108-centimetre average for the entire winter (from November to May).

“We’ve had double the amount of snow since Jan. 1,” when compared to the same time frame last year and we’ve had a year’s worth of snow since Jan. 1,” Phillips said Monday.

More regular occurrences of freeze-and-thaw events — creating patches of ice on roadways, parking lots and sidewalks — have compounded the situation faced by cleanup crews, Phillips said.

City snow-cleaners aren’t the only ones grappling with the strain of being frequently walloped by wintry conditions.

Private operators such as Monster Plowing Company and its 80 regular staff have also been hit hard with a dwindling supply of materials needed to fight the elements, overworked crews and an increase in personal injuries, said general manager George Armstrong.

“We’ve had a record amount of personal injuries,” Armstrong said, listing sprains, strains, and slips and falls. “We’ve had somebody with a collapsed lung and people that blacked out while working. It becomes very tiring.”

Monster Plowing services about 450 steady clients, he said. Armstrong said they have had to turn away hundreds of prospective new clients since the start of the year.

Armstrong said companies have ran out of space to pile snow cleared so far this year, a quandary when dealing with what’s left to come.

Roadside assistance services like CAA have experienced a major jump in the number of calls for help in southern Ontario, said spokesperson Kaitlynn Furse, adding that the most striking was the spike in failed batteries.

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Since the start of the year, the service has handled 304,667 calls, compared to 287,171 during the same period last year.

“We’re seeing more battery calls year-over-year, but we’re also seeing that those battery calls are taking an increasing share of the overall number of calls,” she said, adding that there were 19,741 more battery-related calls this year, than in 2018, and 64,787 more than was recorded over the same stretch in 2017.

Correction - March 5 - This story has been updated to reflect the fact that Mayor John Tory took office in late 2014, not 2010.