River News: Our View

What happened on Oneida County roads over Thanksgiving — or didn’t happen, as the case may be — was not merely a matter of routine public-sector incompetence but a complete and abominable public-safety failure.

County highways remained snow-covered and icy through two of the busiest travel days of the year, while most town roads and neighboring counties managed to do what Oneida County did not: keep the roads clear.

We remind our county officials and employees that taxpayers pay for safe roads — safe for out-of-towners visiting the region, safe for local residents who must make their way to work or seniors to their doctors, safe for emergency responders when there are accidents (likely from unplowed roads), safe for children when the schools are open. 

Power outages in the county only amplified all these failures and made things more dangerous. Seven inches of snow might not cripple the Northwoods, but Oneida County’s pathetic response to last week’s snow amounted to an unnecessary game of Russian roulette that needlessly endangered public safety.

Drivers could feel the difference instantly at the county line. If social media platforms were an old-fashioned telephone switchboard, all its lights would have been flashing last Friday. But social media did not erupt because residents were impatient; it erupted because people were frightened, if not for themselves then for their loved ones.

A common theme on social media was the eerie lack of snow plows as people traveled, at least until they reached neighboring counties that seemed wholly prepared for winter.

The weak explanations offered so far — equipment failure, scheduling decisions, inexperience, and concern over overtime costs — do not absolve anyone of responsibility. In fact, they only sharpen the plow blade.

Before we tackle that nonsense, let’s be clear about what needs to happen.

First, there must be a concrete, enforceable plan in place to make sure this never happens again. Highway commissioner Alex Hegeman said this week that there would be “internal discussions to determine ways to improve on our winter maintenance procedures,” but that’s a whole lot of gaslighting. 

Sorry, Alex, the time for “internal discussions” and “debriefings” is over; there’s going to be external discussions now, and there had better be follow-up action.

We need a written plan, with required protocols, backup staffing rules, equipment redundancy criteria, on-call supervision, and clear triggers for calling in crews when conditions deteriorate. 

This may come as a shock to the folks in the highway department, but winter in the Northwoods is not a surprise. Thanksgiving snow is not an unforeseeable event. Planning for it is not optional.

Second, someone must be fired.

That might sound extreme, but when it comes to public safety, there is no room for error on this scale and no justification ever for a second chance after an entirely preventable failure that put thousands of motorists at risk. 

When an entire system breaks down across a county on one of the busiest travel weekends of the year, institutional accountability demands that responsibility be personal as well as procedural. Apologies do not repair credibility.

Last year, after the assassination attempt on Donald Trump exposed serious Secret Service shortcomings and a failure of leadership, the head of the Secret Service resigned. Likewise, the highway department’s monumental failure over Thanksgiving exposed an equal lack of leadership in a position that presides over public safety. 

As such, the noble thing for highway commissioner Alex Hegeman to do would be to resign. As he himself acknowledged, the buck stops with him. It’s all on his shoulders; the county needs new shoulders.

The failure of leadership is made worse by the message sent to county taxpayers. County employees, including highway department workers, are scheduled to receive a 2.64 percent wage increase next year, with wages and benefits driving personnel costs up by about 4 percent annually. 

That is happening in a county with a poverty rate close to 10 percent, a county in which, for many hardworking residents, a cost-of-living increase is a chapter in a fantasy novel, and where some scrape by on low-wage jobs and can barely afford the gas to get to work — on winter roads the county fails to maintain.

Not to mention that this is the department that not too long ago clamored for a gleaming new majestic highway building to add to the comfort of their incompetence. From now on, anytime someone mentions something about a new highway department building, we have two words for them: Snow plowing.

The county’s residents are poorer still every time the fat-cat bureaucrats of Oneida County fail to get the roads plowed, even though plowing is precisely what their tax dollars pay for. The ordinary citizen bears the risk when public systems malfunction. 

County leadership should be ashamed that it took widespread anger over snowy highways to expose how fragile its winter operations evidently are.

We know that in upcoming county meetings, supervisors will be asking questions. We have already heard some of them from county board chairman Scott Holewinski and executive committee chairman Billy Fried. These are many of the same questions the public is asking, and we would like answers to them as well.

Specifically, why was there no effective backup plan when the initial forecast proved wrong, and the snow continued? Why was there not an on-call layer of supervision empowered to mobilize additional crews when the situation deteriorated? 

Why were crews not called in earlier when anyone could look out a window and see that the snowfall was continuing at a healthy clip? Why did it take “several complaints” before a full response was triggered, and exactly how many complaints were there?

There are 17 snow-plow routes, we are told. How many backup trucks were available for those routes? Why was a backup not immediately deployed when a key hydraulic failure put a primary truck out of service? 

Here’s a thought. Accumulating snow and mechanical breakdowns are both pretty routine in a Northwoods winter, so wouldn’t having a backup in case of equipment failure be a mandatory no-brainer? 

So either the county failed to have an essential public safety component ready to go, or chose not to deploy it when needed. Either way, that is an irredeemable failure and a lack of leadership.

Then, too, if for whatever reason county equipment was insufficient in that moment, why was assistance not requested from neighboring counties that clearly had working equipment and functioning crews on the road?

The excuse that overtime and holiday pay were being minimized only deepens public concern. We’re all for fiscal prudence, but the first rule of public safety management is that such prudence is assured through competent scheduling and realistic planning, not by sacrificing public safety on the fly. 

And the idea that the staff wasn’t adequately trained is moronic. The lack of adequate training didn’t cause the mechanical breakdowns. It certainly wasn’t the reason there was no backup, or why leadership failed to deploy it. It certainly wasn’t the reason inadequate scheduling was approved or that on-call systems weren’t put in place or activated.

That’s not inadequate training, that’s inadequate leadership.

County board chairman Scott Holewinski has pledged to discuss the matter in open session. Good, but such discussion is not enough. The public already knows what went wrong. It doesn’t take a genius to know that too many were too busy eating turkey to take care of the roads, if one wants to boil things down to the truth of the matter.

What’s important now is whether the county is willing to translate that obvious failure into decisive action rather than just proffer up empty apologies and promises that “this will never happen again.”

Until it does.

That action must include a formal, publicly released winter response plan with mandatory triggers for deployment when conditions warrant; documented requirements for backup equipment on critical routes, not just leadership’s hopes and dreams that the weather forecast is correct and the trucks won’t break down.

Finally, we find it interesting that the department didn’t expect any accumulating snow after days of winter storm warnings and the potential for shifting snowfall times.

There must also be a clear chain of on-call supervisory authority to make immediate decisions outside normal work hours and budget cycles. And yes, termination of at least one senior responsible official to restore public confidence that failure at this level has consequences.

We’re appalled that many of these protocols are not already in place.

Taxpayers are not asking for perfection. They are asking for competence. They are asking to be safe, which is what they pay taxes for. They are asking why Oneida County alone, in the middle of the Northwoods, appeared to be improvising its way through a predictable winter storm.

The bottom line is, bureaucratic fat cats deserve no mercy. The public deserves safe roads.

Period.