The city has about half as many contractors to plow during winter storms despite raising pay.

PITTSFIELD, Mass. — The city has half the number of snow plowing contractors it had in 2020.

Commissioner of Public Services and Utilities Ricardo Morales talked snow removal during Monday's public works subcommittee meeting. This year, the city only has 23 contractors compared to five years ago when there were more than 50.

"I think we have good contractors," he said. "We just don't have enough and especially, we don't have enough of the good contractors out there."

Contractor pay went up 2.44 percent in 2025, now between $85 per hour for a three-quarter-ton pickup truck with a push plow and $203 per hour for a 10-wheel truck with a wing and sander. Morales reported that most are paid $96 an hour.

On Presidents Day weekend, a storm dumped around 6 inches of snow on Berkshire County. Just before, the city was able to onboard a few more contractors.

"It's a number in fluctuation," Morales said about the snow removal workforce.

"We only have about 14 sanders so not every contractor has a sander, so we have to divide and be creative about how we treat our quadrants. So we start going out with our own trucks to start treating quadrants or we assign contractors to more than one quadrant to treat, especially with the pre-treatment when we're not plowing."

Pittsfield has 30 quadrants of neighborhood streets with an average of nine lane miles per quadrant.  Because there are more quadrants than contractors, city employees from other divisions fill in the gaps.

For the roads alone, about 10 contractors and as many as 14 city workers are needed to complete the job.

"Let me be clear about what that covers," Morales added. "So the six main routes, that is a total of 158 lane miles, which is more than what most municipalities here in the Berkshires have for their total lane miles."

Pittsfield has a total of about 450 lane miles, which Ward 1 Councilor Kenneth Warren said is double any other community in the county.

Resident Patrick McLaughlin requested a review of the city's snow removal plan, including plow routes, sanding and salting, and contractor hiring.

"Normally during storms, we'll hear that surrounding towns have done a better job than we have so the last few storms, I've driven over to Dalton or driven into Lenox and I've taken a look around and this past storm that I think was the reason this petition went in, we were doing better than the surrounding communities," Ward 5 Councilor Patrick Kavey said.

"But what gets me is the amount of complaints I was getting like 10 days after."

He reported seeing ice-covered streets that were missed about two weeks after the storm.

"The majority of our roads were taken care of and again, the few days after the storm, the city seemed to be in better shape than our surrounding communities but when I'm calling you about the same street every single time we have a storm and I go back to that street, as much as I love doing my drives during snow storms, I just hope that if we knew that there were five streets in my ward specifically that seemed to be an issue every storm, that we would prioritize them, especially when their hills and cars can't get up and down them," Kavey said.

Morales attributed this to missed communication and a lack of workers on the quadrants.

"The only reason our mains were in really good shape is we started doubling up with some bigger contractors," he added. "We did not want to look different than the state."

He reported that there has been a significant amount of ice this winter and it's "very challenging" to deal with from a material standpoint. The city uses sand and three types of salt material and preps accordingly for different kinds of snow.

"It all depends on the storm, what's in the road already, what is expected," Morales said.

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