Commercial snow removal in Ridgewood, NJ

Ridgewood gives the owner of an owner-occupied or vacant property, or otherwise the tenant or occupant, 24 hours to clear the sidewalk. In the B-1, B-2, P and P-2 zones, sidewalks must be cleared as the snow falls, and evening snow after 6 p.m. must be cleared by 9 a.m. If it is not done, the village can clear it and the cost becomes a lien and tax on the property. Snow may not be put in the street where it blocks traffic. Source: Ridgewood Village Code §249-1 to §249-3. A commercial snow contract can include walkway clearing and treatment so the deadline is met without anyone on site having to remember it.

Ridgewood has 95 miles of public road in it, of which the town itself is responsible for 80. That is the 5th largest municipal road list of the 70 municipalities in Bergen County, against a county median of 29.8. Bergen County crews handle another 1 miles here, and NJDOT 14 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, which matters in a town this size: 80 miles of municipal road means the town's own crews are working a long list before anything else gets attention.

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 property managers and multi-site portfolios in and around Ridgewood, where one contract and one invoice can cover every site you run, with identical trigger depths and report formats across all of them. Nearby towns we also cover include Ho-Ho-Kus, Glen Rock, Midland Park.