With the winter season upon us, pathways and sidewalks need sand to help people walk safely on the icy paths, but with the city of Edmonton reducing the majority of sandboxes around the city, several community leagues want to maintain it.
City of Edmonton reduced its sandboxes from 770 to 111 for this year’s winter.
Community leagues decided to maintain their own sandboxes despite not knowing how much it would cost them.
Chelsea Balzan the President of Glastonbury Community League has been with the league for almost four years and this winter season is going to be different for her community.
“When the weather turns inclement, it’s harder to travel to get things that make our path safer,” said Balzan.
The City of Edmonton reduced the number of community sandboxes last year from 770 to 111 as part of its updated snow and ice program.
“So, things like bus stops and public amenities, we increased the service level on there as a result, what we did is we centralized a large amount of those green sandboxes that people are used to seeing into 11 centralized large bin locations,” said Valerie Dacyk, General Supervisor of Infrastructure Field Operations, City of Edmonton.
However, with the updated program, several communities along with Glastonbury want to maintain the sandbox program but Balzan said it is going to be harder to maintain their pathways.
“There’s disappointment trying to figure out how to keep some of those resources in the community so a lot of brainstorming trying to figure out how to make that happen,” said Balzan.
Adding that, it gives another responsibility to the organization to keep up with the supply of sand during the winter season.
“We’ve decided to allocate funds towards it. We’ve planned for so many refills for this part of winter and to next year’s budget for the second part of winter, we just don’t know how much it’s going to cost,” said Balzan.
An estimated 900,000 dollars of funds were allocated to the old snow and ice program, despite the majority of sandboxes being reduced for this year’s winter.
The city says they don’t plan to reduce the number of boxes in the future.
“If there are boxes that are still out there that were part of the old program, they won’t be getting filled and as we run into them, we will be removing them,” said Dacyk.