The Sauk Centre herald. (Sauk Centre, Stearns County, Minn.) 1886-current, 1929-11-28
SNOW REMOVAL

! The following editorial was printed last March
| in the Fergus Falls Daily Journal. With winter
right ahead of us, the editorial is more timely
now than when it first appeared: The Journal said:
when the opening of highways in winter was
first suggested few years ago, the suggestion was
greeted with loud cries of disapprova Absurd, rid
culous impossible-a plan calculated to break the
taxpayers the cry heard in many quarters. It
had not been done to that time and because it had
/ not been done, conservative people though it could
not be done.
+ But advocates of snow removal not dis
| couraged. They realized that the plan must be
| adopted and that the only question was how soon
They knew that the day of the motor vehicle was
| here and that the day of horse drawn vehicles on
the highways fast passing.
with the people spending billions of dollars for
automobiles, and states counties, cities and town
ships spending hundreds of millions of dollars on
roads, they said poor business policy to keep
all this investment idle during at least third of the
year. No factory owner business corporation,
would think of anything so foolish as to invest a
hundred million dollars in plant and machinery and
allow it to lie idle from onehalf to one-third of the
year. if there any possibility of keeping it in OPP
Grafton Advocates of open highways knew that the
people in the course of time, would the futity
of the old system of closed winter roads.
During the past winter, the state highway de-
partment has kept practically every mile of the en-
tire 1880 miles of trunk highway open TO traffic. with
the exception of occasional day when storm was
raging This is a better record than the railways
made years ago.
snowplows and has been keeping county highways
open this winter and the Otter Tail county commits
soners have recently gotten into line and appropriate
ed $4,000 to assist in opening county highways The
weather has been unusually unfavorable since this
work undertaken but lot of roads have never
theless been opened and this much snow
moval will more than its cost there will be
less water and consequently less damage done these
highways by the spring breakup
with the state clearing the trunk highways,
farmers finding it more and more difficult to get
about with seighs. Many of them have been leav-
ing their autos with neighbor living close to
a highway during the winter. driving to the high
way by sleigh and then going to their nearest city
village by Others have organized crews and
opened sderoads to auto traffic That farmers
deeply interested in roads has been demonstrate
ed again and again where they have raised funds to
hire snowplows.
Sentiment in favor of open highways is stead
lily growing, and the time will come when people will
more think of building roads and making no eff
fort to keep them open in winter than they now
think of building roads and making effort to
keep them open in summer. Roads may be impas-
sable during extraordinary storms either in summer
winter, but that is reason why they should be
allowedto remain impossible, especially with every
one driving autos they doing today"