‘Tis the season for snowplows, and one Fredonia village trustee complained about them this week.

“I did receive complaints from people downtown that they shoveled the sidewalks in front of their businesses, and along came the snowplow and created more snow, just kind of clumped up the snow,” Michelle Twichell said at a Fredonia Board of Trustees workshop.

“It just creates more of a mess, almost. I’d rather see people create like a path when they walk the sidewalks,” she added. “The sidewalk plow doesn’t seem to be going down low enough to remove the snow, plus the tire tracks are creating areas where people could even twist their ankles.”

Scott Marsh, village Department of Public Works Director, said the village is in “OK shape now” when it comes to plows.

“We had a few breakdowns, hopefully we’ll have everything back together before this next round (of snow) comes,” he said. “All the main drags, everything’s open.

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The sidewalks, we’re struggling with. We just got so much snow at one time. … The side streets are going to be a challenge.”

Marsh said DPW gets “the majority of the snow off the sidewalks, so the homeowner only maybe has to shovel a couple inches.” The plows can’t scrape the sidewalks clean because it might rip up the sidewalks, he said.

Property owners are technically supposed to clear their own sidewalks — but the Fredonia DPW has traditionally offered some help with large snowfalls.

“This is how we’ve done it for 30 years,” Marsh said. “I’m open for suggestions, if you just want to not plow them.”

Trustee Jon Espersen said, “I think if we’re asking residents to go out and shovel 3 feet of heavy snow, I think it’s going to keep the ambulance service very busy if we all did that. I think the more snow you can remove and ease the burden on the homeowner to clear what’s left, is a much safer way to do it.”

Ironically, Twichell then switched course to talk about a sidewalk that had not been plowed. She said a Barker Library employee called her to complain about that.

“Also, I went to the post office yesterday and there were a couple people with someone in a wheelchair, and they were trying to cross the street over here on the corner of Day and Church, and they had nowhere to go because there was a six foot wall of snow that blocked their path going to the next sidewalk, and they had to go out in the road.” Twichell acknowledged that the path was later cleared, but added, “I really feel there should be special attention paid to situations like that.”

Twichell continued to lecture Marsh about it. “I just saw a very dangerous situation in my eyes,” she said.

Espersen retorted, “There are dangerous situations everywhere when you’ve got 3 feet of snow and two or three plows.”