Commercial snow removal in Fort Lee, NJ

Fort Lee gives residential owners or tenants 12 hours after the snowfall ends to clear the sidewalk and any fire hydrant. Commercial, professional and office properties have four daylight hours. If it is not done, a snow removal service clears it under the direction of the Building Inspector and the cost becomes a lien on the property. Snow from private property may not be put onto any public sidewalk or street. Source: Fort Lee Borough Code §360-2 to §360-8. A commercial snow contract can include walkway clearing and treatment so the deadline is met without anyone on site having to remember it.

Fort Lee has 51 miles of public road in it, of which the town itself is responsible for 36. That is the 24th largest municipal road list of the 70 municipalities in Bergen County, against a county median of 29.8. Bergen County crews handle another 6 miles here, and NJDOT 6 miles of state highway. None of those crews touch private property. A parking lot, its access road and its loading area are the owner's responsibility no matter how well the public roads around them are cleared, which is the reason a commercial property needs its own contract. Road mileage figures are NJDOT's, from its Mileage by Municipality and Jurisdiction report.

At the Bergen County station, an average winter brings 8.2 days with an inch or more of snow, 5.4 with two inches or more and 1.2 with six or more, counted across 155 winters. That is the number a seasonal price is built from, because a trigger depth decides how many of those days bring a truck out. The lightest winter on that record had 0 plowable days and the heaviest had 21, which is the swing a seasonal contract exists to absorb.

The long-record station for Bergen County averages 30.4 inches a season, and the worst season on that record was 78.4 inches in the 1995-96 winter. The average is the number people budget from and the maximum is the number that decides whether a seasonal contract was worth it. Both come from Newark Liberty Intl (nearest long-record station). Two towns in the same county can still differ on the ground, because elevation moves snowfall more than distance does.

Crews are alerted more than an hour before snow is expected to begin, so equipment is moving before the first flake rather than after the phone rings. Salt and machines are staged at locations across Bergen County and its neighbors rather than dispatched from a single yard.

A trigger depth agreed in writing before the season, not a judgment call during the storm. Every property gets a written plan covering trigger depths, priority areas and where the piles go, settled before winter, plus a service report after every event.

Yes, and it is how a lot of our work runs. We are a fit for retail centers and shopping plazas in and around Fort Lee, where routes are built to finish before store opening, and pile management keeps parking spaces available deep into the winter. Nearby towns we also cover include Leonia, Palisades Park, Edgewater.