Mission Statement and Primary Responsibilities

Mission Statement:

Improve our community through performing maintenance work that will extend the life and effectiveness of our roadway and storm water systems. Enhance the safety of our community through plowing and salting operations and maintaining our streets and traffic signs/signals. Augment other City Departments through fleet maintenance and various construction projects. 

Primary Responsibilities:

The Streets Department is responsible for the repair and maintenance, including snow and ice removal of the City’s roadway network consisting of 228 lineal miles (630 lane miles) of roadway and 450 cul-de-sacs. Other services include, but are not limited to: traffic control, election setup and takedown, street patching, shouldering, weed control, roadside mowing, street line striping, Christmas Tree pickup, flags, banners, maintaining over 6,000 street signs, 368 sidewalk lights, 8 flashing pedestrian signals and 4 signalized intersections and forestry work within the right of way. The Streets Department is also responsible for the repair and maintenance of the city’s fleet of street equipment, plows, parks equipment, utility equipment, police and fire vehicles and general city vehicles.

The Streets Department is responsible for the operation of the City’s recycling center and assist in providing information to residents regarding recycling, trash pickup, hazardous waste disposal and finding alternative disposal solutions for various items. 

The Water Resource Management Division is aided by street department personnel who are assigned projects to ensure proper flow of storm water throughout the City. The Water Resource Management is responsible for ditching, endwalls, culvert replacement, street sweeping, catch basin repairs, steaming frozen culverts and special stormwater projects dealing with the installation of storm sewer pipes.

Awards & Recognition

The Street Department and Utility Department, with assistance from the Utility department, was awarded one of five of CVMIC's (Cities and Villages Insurance Company) Significant Program Award for safety ideas in 2014. The submission "Move Over or Slow Down" is used to educate the public on moving over and slowing down when they see employees working on City Streets.

The Street Department won the 2015 CVMIC award for the "Rack and Stack" entry. Snow plow blade storage racks were fabricated in house to save money. These racks provide a safer way for employees to install plow blades and store them in less space.

The Street Department won the award a third year in a row in 2016 for the "Hazardous Liquid Tank Bumper Protection System." This bumper was fabricated from discarded basketball poles, which was repurposed to produce bumpers for the oil storage tanks in our garages.

The Street Department won an additional award in 2021 for the creation of a “Salt Chunk Sifter”. By modifying an existing unused excavator bucket, we were able to reduce the number and size of salt chunks within our salt pile. This leads to less time performing the dangerous task of removing ice chunks from our salters during plowing operations.

Each winning program is awarded $1,000 to purchase safety, loss control or risk management related products or services for their municipality. CVMIC created this program many years ago in an effort to recognize and reward innovative programs created by members. The intent is to promote sharing of resources and ideas among members. All submissions are reviewed and scored by the Risk Management Focus Group. Detailed information regarding the programs, as well as previous submissions are available on the CVMIC website.