Each winter, another chance for the ‘alley captains’ of St. Paul to show their quality

Talking to a St. Paul neighbor the other day, he was surprised when I mentioned the rigamarole around alley plowing.

“That’s not right, the city plows our alley,” Phil told me. “They do a great job, much better than the regular streets.”

“No,” I told him. “That’s not the city.”

Whether he knows it or not, Phil’s alley, like everyone else’s in St. Paul, is part of a long list of municipal quirks: The city doesn’t plow the hundreds of miles of alleys in the winter, like Minneapolis’ Department of Public Works does.

In St. Paul, it’s every block for themselves. Plowing service is contracted separately by so-called “alley captains” who arrange in an entirely piecemeal way. People can live for years in St. Paul, depending on its alleys, without even realizing how they work.

The long winter’s quest

The longest-tenured alley captain I could track down was Jim Sissini, who’s been organizing the snow plowing in his West 7th alley for over 40 years.

“It all goes back to the blizzard of ’91,” Sissini told me (because of course he did).

“My daughter came home with snow piled on her pumpkin costume, but the next day we couldn’t get out of the alley,” Sissini explained, referencing the near-mythical storm that dumped over 8 inches of snow onto St. Paul streets as trick or treating wrapped up.

“The snow was up to our waist; nobody had plowed,” Sissini said. “And I look down the street one block down, and it’s clear as a bell. I start walking down the alley, trudging through the waist deep snow, knocking on doors, asking ‘Who plows your alley?’ ‘Who plows your alley?’ I finally found the alley captain.”

Thanks to grit and determination, Jim Sissini identified the right guy for the job, and contracted out with a local plow guy named Steve.

Somewhat unbelievably, Steve just retired last year. This winter will be the first time since in my memory that his block of Bayard will have a new plower, and thanks to Sissini, it’s another local guy discovered via word-of-mouth.

“When we started out, there were only about 10 or 15 people using the alley,” Jim Sissini said. “As more people moved in, and built better garages, more people started using the alley. The garbage is the other thing; you gotta get the garbage and recycle trucks back there.”

He now has over two dozen grateful neighbors paying into the community chest. Most years, Sissini gets some surplus and uses it to buy a gift card to Pizza Hut as a post-blizzard perk for the driver.

Finding the right guy with a truck

Not everyone has it so easy. It all depends on having a block with enough willing participants, and finding a plow driver you can rely on.

“In my day job, I’m a project manager,” explained Christina Morrison, a Highland resident who took over alley captain duties this year. ”I work in design and construction, so I didn’t think this was going to be a huge challenge. But I found this was a really specialized service, specific to St Paul and alleys, that most contractors don’t want to touch.”

When Morrison stepped into the captain role, she ended up adopting the age-old practice of “asking around,” instead of her usual professional, 21st-century approach. Most companies don’t want to engage in block-by-block, a la carte service typical of St. Paul. After weeks of searching, she eventually got a handful of bids that varied wildly, everything from $500 to $1,500 a season.

“It’s more like a ‘guy with a truck’ kind of service,” Morrison said. “Those people are kind of hard to find. They don’t have websites, and you just sort of get a phone number from neighbors.”

Payment collection

The other difficult practice involves payment. An alley captain almost always pays the entire cost for the season up-front, and then recoups costs from their neighbors. This typically involves a (sometimes passive aggressive) note placed in people’s mailboxes, a largely thankless task. Then, there’s the question of what to do if the plow guy doesn’t show up.

“I truly hate that St. Paul doesn’t do it themselves,” said Rachel Wilken, an alley captain in the Mac-Groveland neighborhood. “I know it doesn’t work this way for everyone. Some people, like in Frogtown, don’t have someone on their block that can float $600 in the beginning of the season, or have rentals with high turnover. Is the owner paying, or is the renter paying?”

Your mileage may vary. Eric Haugee, an Frogtown alley captain in Frogtown, is even-keeled about his experience over the last few years.

“The guy who does it is really great; he lives in Hastings now, but grew up near here and is super flexible,” explained Haugee. “I go door to door and put a flier in everyone’s door, and ask for $30 a family for the plowing for the alleyway.”

Haugee had one notable holdout on his block for years, insisting that they would shovel their alley themselves. They finally moved away, clearing the way for proper unified service along Edmund Avenue.

“The overall cost is $600; sometimes we collect more, sometimes less,” Haugee said. “Mostly the homeowners pretty much all pay, and the renters are about 50/50.”

A few years ago, the city did an inconclusive study on the whole system, gathering difficult info. Surveys varied across the city, and how much service people received paralleled the different homeownership and income rates by neighborhood. It once again called into question the libertarian civics of St. Paul’s back pathways. For example, without proper alley plowing, basic services like trash collection gets shut down for weeks after a snowstorm.

“There are just so many facets to it that individual residents are not necessarily well equipped to deal with,” said Christina Morrison, who does not think that the city’s libertarian approach is very equitable. She referred to people with disabilities, or older folks who might not be familiar with Venmo. But like most St. Paul alley captains, she’s persevering and making it work. It doesn’t hurt that there’s been zero snow so far this winter.

Meanwhile in Frogtown, things are working fine for Eric Haguee.

“I’ve gone back and forth on I whether I think it should be a public service,” Haugee said. “Philosophically, I feel like it should be a service of the city, but I also recognize our alleys are not conducive to having good services. Some alleys aren’t paved. We have alleys that have weird curves or dead ends. They’ve had challenges, [but] I think we get better service by contracting with an individual than by going through the city.”

Over in Mac-Groveland, Rachel Wilken’s work as an alley captain has been mostly uneventful.

“It’s been fine,” Wilken says, who firmly believes that the system is unfair. “I think my experience has been better than most.”

Personally, I haven’t yet received word from my usual alley captain neighbor, who each year threatens to quit, and each year keeps doing the job. I’m a bit nervous for whenever it finally snows — our block might discover we’re left out in the cold.

Worst-case scenario? I’ll have to take over the job.