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I am emailing in regards to the absurd amount of salt the city is putting down on our roads.
Case in point is the Gowan Street sidewalk on a recent Wednesday morning. The sidewalk was literally carpeted with salt. Even if it was freezing rain a little that morning and not in the afternoon, that is still way too much salt.
The worst part is that it seems that whoever put this salt down used the entire block's worth, because the salt stops the next block up from Gowan. There's no salt anywhere on the sidewalks.
This is compounded by the big salt piles in the middle of Essa Road, as well as along the gutters, ready to be washed down the gutter. Even with the capture systems in place, this amount of salt, regardless of the time of year, seems excessive in a financial way ... not only in an environmental sense, where increasing salinization around Lake Simcoe can increase salinization in Lake Simcoe.
I am very concerned about this trend and wish local governments could have more jurisdiction to decide their own salt levels, instead of the provincially mandated minimums, which also seem slightly excessive.
Curtis Hagerman
Barrie
