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Administration details after-action changes to snow operations; OPDA, weather stations and drones used to improve response
Summary
Assistant City Manager Bailey and DPS Director Riley presented an after-action assessment of Winter Storm Blair and described immediate steps — staffing plans, technology pilots including weather stations and drones, tablet deployment and improved preventive maintenance — while acknowledging a snowplow tracker server outage that limited public access during the event.
The Cincinnati administration told council they have implemented multiple procedural and technological changes to winter operations after a review of last winters response to Winter Storm Blair, citing staffing shortfalls, outdated route maps and technology gaps that contributed to past problems.
Assistant City Manager Bailey presented a situational assessment requested by motion 20250054 and said the departments staffing had dropped by about 125 positions over 17 years and that a 2020 early-retirement incentive removed 28 experienced winter-operations employees. Bailey said those changes, plus halted capital replacement after 2021, left the Public Services Department (DPS) less prepared for an extraordinary snow event, and that the city is now implementing a range of recommendations.
"We needed more experienced staff," Bailey said, listing priorities including route prioritization, communications, staffing, PPE, technology, fleet training and improved metrics. He said the city has begun deploying tablets in vehicles, working with the Office of Performance and Data Analytics (OPDA) on pilot GPS and service-request (SR) solutions, and training supervisors through a new obstacle-course approach.
DPS Director Riley described immediate tactical steps: create a scalable staffing plan that can activate CDL and non-CDL personnel from other departments during an event; improve parts inventories to reduce vehicle downtime; expand preventative maintenance; optimize routes that had not been updated in decades; and pilot weather stations to gather road temperatures and real-time conditions on specific streets.
Riley said the city would use drones, in partnership with departments that already operate them, to get eyes on bottlenecks quickly and to avoid sending supervisors on long drives to verify problems. He also described materials and equipment changes, including anti-icing strategies (brine and beet-heat liquids), an asphalt truck that keeps hot mix usable in cold temperatures and a new cold patch product (AquaPatch) intended to provide longer-lasting repairs in winter conditions.
OPDA Director Jamieson described data partnerships and visualizations used in recent dry runs and said OPDA will continue to iterate on a snowplow-tracker pilot. Jamieson and Riley acknowledged that the snowplow tracker experienced a server outage during the event because high public interest overloaded the servers; they said they are addressing capacity so the public-facing system will be reliable.
Council members pressed whether the weather-station app would be public (Jamieson said it is internal for the pilot) and asked staff to define measurable metrics for success; staff said work remains on KPIs but listed staffing, fleet availability, pretreatment coverage and improved service-request handling as target areas. Members praised quick operational improvements during the recent storm and asked for metrics and staffing proposals to be included in budget deliberations.
Ending
Administration said it will continue to refine metrics and present staffing and capital requests during the budget season; council thanked staff for the work and filed items 1 and 2 before adjourning.
