What is the city paying private contractors for snow removal? Eighty-five cents an hour, if they’re using a rowboat.

Earlier today we were over at the city’s “Snow Room” listening to Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake, along with the heads of the city’s fire, police and transportation departments, brief the press about what’s going on with the Great Blizzard of 2010. Her main points were interesting:

- Total cleanup of the city will cost more than $1 million, which will come from the city’s general fund and 75 percent of which will hopefully be reimbursed by FEMA.

- Crime has been pretty muted by the snow — only two street robberies and one commercial burglary have been reported since the storm began late Friday, which Police Commissioner Fred Bealefeld called “like, incredible!”

- 120 trees were knocked over, and 20 power lines taken down by the snow.

- There were two major house fires during the storm, both of which were put out without serious injury or death. There have been 1,500 311 calls and 376 EMS calls.

- As of 9 a.m. today, city snow removal vehicles had logged 81,000 miles.

- There are 110 pieces of snow removal equipment in the field. Twenty-one private contractors have been enlisted to help, and 13 more are in line, being processed by the city’s procurement apparatus for more work.

The mayor’s verdict?

“Let’s be clear about one thing: This city was safe during this historic emergency,” she said, noting that the full cleanup will take at least a few more days.

But the BEST thing we learned today we learned from a list of fixed rates for services that the city is paying private contractors (see this document). The list, provided to us by the mayor’s spokesman, Ryan O’Doherty, goes line by line for every conceivable type of equipment and service, priced based on an hourly rate, which one could use to remove snow from roads.

Got a broom you’re willing to take to the pavement? The city will pay you $14 an hour if it’s 72-inches long. Got a 96-inch broom? The rate goes up to $23 per hour. If you are the proud owner of a “Bucket, Clamshell,” you’re due up to $13.50 an hour! A 625-horsepower bulldozer? An hourly rate of $240!

But our favorite, FAVORITE line item on this document was the simple, elegant, “Boat, Row,” which corresponded with the kingly hourly rate of 85 cents an hour from the city of Baltimore. The only equipment/service that pays less?

“Discharge Hose.”

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Any politician who thinks that the 50-some inches of snow that just got dumped on Baltimore is an “act of God” — we need to just stick it out, and it’ll eventually get cleaned up — would do well to revisit the story of Jane Byrne and Michael Bilandic.

The Chicago Tribune has a nice little summary of the story here, but the gist of it is that in the stormy January of 1979, Byrne unseated Bilandic, the mayor who had fired her from city government two years earlier, and became the first female mayor of Chicago. She had been the head of consumer affairs for the city, a mid-level government position, but one that she enjoyed with the support of the Daley Democratic machine. So how did she beat, Bilandic, the incumbent acting mayor with a long history in city politics as both a lawyer and an alderman? The answer is four letters long: SNOW.

Two huge storms dumped 35 inches of snow on the city over the course of about two weeks, and the widely-held public opinion was that Bilandic was too inept at cleaning it up. “Streets were not plowed, garbage was not collected and mass transit was staggered. Chicago was the city that could not get to work. By Election Day, many voters who had been faithful to the machine were ready to dump Bilandic,” the Tribune writes.

Stephanie Rawlings-Blake has a year before she has to worry about any electoral primary challenge, but as anyone in this town knows, Baltimoreans have long memories. If the prevailing opinion of SR-B’s job cleaning up this frosty mess shifts negative, it could be a problem. Already Gov. Martin O’Malley has predicted a $40 million cleanup bill, and scolded Marylanders for their impatience with the cleanup. Meanwhile, Rawlings-Blake has been shown on TV in the city’s special Emergency Operations Center (known these days as the “Snow Room”) nearly around the clock. Yesterday the Baltimore Business Journal published a rather random selection of local businesspeople giving their opinions on the mayor’s cleanup effort, which ranged from vague statements about the “great job” SR-B is doing to carping about Thames Street being still unplowed. Twitter has been abuzz (here’s one feed that’s been particularly vocal) with plowing updates and griping. But by and large, the jury’s still out.

But pols beware: Don’t get Byrned by the snow!

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