The first public sign that something had changed within St. Paul Public Works came from an Uber driver.

West Side resident Paul Schatz took to Twitter on a Thursday morning in early February to declare St. Paul’s streets highly navigable, plowed curb-to-curb of fresh snow, more neatly and thoroughly than he could ever recall.

“Better than ever,” posted Schatz, under the Twitter handle @pwschatz.

As even television news reports offered rare praise, St. Paul Public Works officials said at the time the sentiment was widespread and appreciated. And the results were no accident.

Following the infamous winter of 2013-2014, new strategies have cut snow removal costs 20 percent and use far less salt.

It’s an example of the multipronged approach on the part of Public Works officials to improve department functions from bidding procedures to sewer repair. With an annual budget of $142 million, the department employs more than 300 workers.

“We’re the largest department, moneywise, in the city,” said Public Works Director Kathy Lantry, who on March 2 passed her first year on the job. “We need to make sure people understand what we’re doing, and that we’re holding ourselves accountable with key metrics.”

RESTRUCTURING A BIG CITY DEPARTMENT

Not all of the innovations are as visible as the snow-emergency response. Nevertheless, without so much as a single layoff and only one new hire, some changes have been even more fundamental.

In fact, Lantry said, St. Paul Public Works’ ongoing restructuring represents the largest organizational evolution of a city department since the Department of Safety and Inspections was created, merging multiple offices in 2006, or the creation of the city’s Human Rights and Equal Economic Opportunity department soon after.

Under Lantry, there are now two top bosses. Public Works’ engineering and planning functions have been separated from operations and maintenance, leading to the creation of a new role that serves opposite the city engineer.

Bev Farraher, the department’s new operations manager, brings with her 27 years’ experience at the Minnesota Department of Transportation and oversees city street maintenance, as well as sewer, traffic, bridge and right-of-way management.

Paul Kurtz took over as city engineer for John Maczko in January. Maczko is now the city’s special projects and traffic engineer.

Two new divisions round out the department. Led by Lantry’s former legislative aide, Ellen Biales, the division of Resident and Employee Services is working on a call center to triage public inquiries, feedback and complaints. Another division focuses on Transportation Planning and Safety.

PATRONAGE OR RAPPORT?

In early 2015, when St. Paul Mayor Chris Coleman tapped Lantry, then the city council president, to head up Public Works — a job she had never applied for — objections surfaced from many corners.

Coleman said at the time he had chosen a well-known and outspoken leader, a fifth-generation St. Paulite intimately familiar with the city’s every neighborhood, who would need little ramp-up time.

Critics, however, said the appointment smelled of patronage and insider politics. Lantry, a fellow DFLer widely thought to be a possible contender for mayor in 2017, had served alongside Coleman when he sat on the council a decade earlier. The daughter of a former state senator, Lantry and the mayor both came from established political families.

Perhaps most alarmingly of all, Lantry brought with her no background in engineering or street maintenance, requirements written into the job description.

In fact, the city had paid the Springsted consulting firm $10,000 to find candidates with proven experience, and a professional running a Public Works department in Evanston, Ill., had been flown in for interviews.

The candidate, Suzette Robinson, was African-American and female, and had helped make Evanston’s Public Works department more bike-friendly and racially diverse — key goals of the Coleman administration.

The mayor opted instead for Lantry, a sometimes-ally who also had proven herself to be an occasional rival on budget issues — including street maintenance.

With accumulated snows narrowing streets, the difficult winter of 2013-2014 had required the department to institute the first-ever citywide parking ban.

That spring was arguably worse. When the snows finally melted, major roads were pockmarked. In June 2014, Lantry had derided the mayor’s proposed road-repair budget in a written statement that compared Coleman’s plans to “putting a Band-Aid on a broken hip.”

The mayor urged patience. He and the council president later came together on a plan to prioritize repair of the city’s most pothole-ridden, heavily traveled roads — the “Terrible 20” of street repair.

Lantry is now overseeing that project’s completion.

‘A VERY DIFFERENT CULTURE’

In August 2014, the mayor announced that outside consultants would examine the department’s winter street performance and recommend changes. They included the Civic Consulting group, KLJ Engineering led by former Minnesota Department of Transportation commissioner Tom Sorel, and the University of Minnesota’s Center for Transportation Studies.

By December 2014, focus groups and individual interviews with staffers helped highlight key areas of concern: strategic planning, internal and external communications, the need for employee cross-training.

In March 2015, the mayor appointed Lantry to fill the vacancy created by the retirement of former department director Rich Lallier. She was immediately struck by how much information was held in people’s memories, instead of codified, and the lack of succession planning.

Three subgroups of staffers from all levels of the department were soon meeting to discuss possible changes to everything from budgeting to the department’s organizational structure. The official kickoff for the reorganization took place May 28, 2015.

“I’m a very different leader for them,” said Lantry, in an interview shortly afterward. “As soon as somebody comes up with an idea, I’m ‘let’s try it!’ And, as engineers, they try to be more thoughtful about things.”

“Should we be about moving traffic as quickly as we can through neighborhoods? … The fact that I’m asking questions and saying ‘Why do we have to do things like that?’ … can cause a little bit of anxiety,” Lantry said. “It’s a very different culture in Public Works.”

Administrative manager Bruce Beese, a former department director, led a process team assigned to review nine key work areas within a year’s time, from construction inspection to customer service and fleet management.

Kurtz and Joe Spah, an assistant city engineer for streets maintenance, teamed with Margeaux King, a human resources director from Ecolab, and a representative from every division within the department to come up with options for organizational designs.

Working with the city’s human resources director, Angie Nalezny, and Deputy Mayor Kristin Beckmann, the committee on organizational structure met every Monday in May and June 2015.

MORE PLANNING, LESS REACTING

After some soul searching, the committee recommended an option that emphasizes cross-training, intended to help staffers grow their skills. A bridge engineer might be called upon to engineer a road.

A key area of concern was the five-year capital projects plan, a list of every Public Works construction project in the city, which tended to get backlogged and heavily reordered by the fifth year.

In addition to two new divisions and a new operations manager, the department created a capital projects finance position to oversee the plan and coordinate all financing and funding of Public Works projects.

“We’re really great at putting out fires as a department, but what we’re not so great at is being plan-ful,” Kurtz said. “If we have a plan in place, maybe we can be less reactionary.”

Annual scoping retreats now draw members of the Planning and Economic Development Department, the Office of Financial Services, St. Paul Regional Water Services and other key departments that work closely with Public Works.

A retreat this past February allowed the departments to examine the upcoming year’s projects across disciplines.

Working with accountants from Redpath and Co., Public Works has also focused on crafting better budgets and cost estimates for construction projects and getting them bid earlier.

In an embarrassment for the department, reconstruction of Jackson Street was budgeted at $8.45 million in 2014, and then revised upward in February at double the cost — $16.5 million — in part because of a changing marketplace. Cost estimates had been based on comparable road construction from 2013, but with the economy improving, contractors have gotten choosier over the past three years about which projects to bid on.

City Council Member Dan Bostrom remains critical of the department’s cost overruns on several downtown projects, from CHS Field in Lowertown to the reconstruction of Kellogg Boulevard.

“They can find an extra $8 million for Jackson Street, but when it comes to money for the neighborhoods, it’s an impossible find,” Bostrom said. “That’s what gripes me.”

A five-year street improvement plan also will undergo changes.

“Once every three years, a human being walks every street in the city of St. Paul and marks what condition the pavement is,” Lantry said. The new goal is to add more detail, such as traffic volumes, small area plans, bike plans and public complaints.

Workers have called the department of 385 employees top-heavy with engineers and supervisors but short on on-the-ground workers. Over the past year, the street maintenance division filled 10 supervisor positions from internal candidates, without adding employees to backfill workers.

“They didn’t add any manpower,” said an employee who asked not to be identified because interviews with the press violate city rules. “It’s like an upside-down Christmas tree.”

THE WINTER BLUES

The most visible changes likely will come during winter street maintenance. Spah said the department organized its snow strategy around three goals: safe and passable streets, safe and passable sidewalks and satisfied customers.

Within those categories, the department created seven metrics — quantifiable goals that could be measured and compared after each “snow event,” when fewer than three inches fall, or snow emergency.

Among them, the metrics call for treating 90 percent of busy arterial roads within 10 hours after each snowfall of 3 inches or less, and when appropriate, applying a brine-based deicer to all downtown streets prior to the event.

“If you can really get out in front of the storm, you’re much more efficient,” Spah said.

It’s too early to estimate long-term savings, but budget manager John McCarthy said the department studied its spending after two snowstorms this winter and estimated expenses had decreased by 20 percent. The pretreatment with brine reduced salt usage by 40 percent.

At StPaul.gov/snow, a new snow parking app allows smartphone users to glance at a screen for a quick reminder as to what side of the street they should park on during a snow emergency.

New snow-emergency text alerts rolled out in Hmong, Somali and Spanish. Online videos spell out the snow emergency rules in eight languages.

And a Public Works newsletter and additional newsletters internal to the department keep the public and employees up to date on changes.

PARKING METERS ON GRAND AVENUE?

For Public Works, one of the more controversial questions of 2015 was whether the department would roll out parking meters along the Grand Avenue business district, a political lightning rod during last November’s city council elections.

After maintenance and installation costs, the meters were expected to generate some $400,000 in net revenue in 2016 and $600,000 in 2017, with most of the money going to the city’s general fund. The mayor withdrew the proposal last year amid heated opposition.

Lantry said she does not foresee installing new meters elsewhere in the city.

The department has unveiled a smartphone application that allows drivers to feed their meters remotely, and Public Works will convert some traditional meters near the state Capitol building to electronic smart meters. Downtown meters now expire at 10 p.m. Monday through Saturday, and some near CHS Field or the Xcel Energy Center charge event rates.

Public Works recently put citywide curbside recycling pickup out for bid and received four responses. Despite mixed results, the single-sort system implemented by Eureka Recycling in April 2014 isn’t going away. “We’re getting pretty close on our final negotiations,” Lantry said.

Another key question is how to go about collecting kitchen scraps and other forms of organic waste household by household, which the mayor had once proposed rolling out in 2013.

Public Works contemplated combining organics and recycling pickup in one contract, but a review of how other cities handle organics made the department rethink that approach. Ramsey County has issued its own report on organics collection, which the department is still studying, Lantry said.