With a modest increase to the budget, the City of Moose Jaw engineering department feels residents will notice a solid improvement to winter road maintenance in 2019.

City Engineer Josh Mickleborough says they went through the current policy, made some tweaks and refinements before finding the most cost-effective way to make the most impact.

"Council approved an addition of $132,000 and what this will allow us to do is take some of what we refer to as temporary staff, three of them, and move them to what we call permanent full-time staff."

The significance of that is the ability to now run plows and graders for almost 24 hours a day following a major snow event, rather than only running 8 or 10-hour shifts. Contractors will also help to fill in holes in the schedule and removing snow that gets piled up.

Mickleborough says that the 19% increase will effectively double their ability to respond to a storm and hopes that this will be a noticeable improvement to service, pending final approval of council's budget deliberations.

Budget talks have been suspended for the holidays and will resume January 7th.