THE RANT: Dear snow patrol

Dear snow patrol (campus maintenance),

I greatly appreciate all that you do for the University of South Dakota. You’re always working hard to keep the university clean and safe for the students, faculty and staff, which is greatly appreciated by many.

However, I do have one complaint. It’s winter. The season finally found us, even though many of us wish it hadn’t, and it’s been making up for lost time by doling out some nasty weather in the last two weeks. My complaint is that the snow removal leaves much to be desired.

I understand you can’t control what the weather does, but you can control the cleanup efforts. The North Complex parking lot two weekends ago was a disaster to walk through, drive through and park in. I shouldn’t have to be deathly afraid to walk to my car to go to work because it’s so slick since no salt has been put down.

Also, my car shouldn’t get stuck in the parking lot while trying to park my car for the evening. Not only once, or twice, but three times, my car got stuck in the snow because it hadn’t been touched. There was no attempt at removing the snow over the weekend, which made it a dangerous place for cars to be driving.

I’m not a reckless driver, nor do I treat snow lightly. I am very careful while driving in the winter months, but it’d be nice if the appropriate action was taken to clean up the mess. There wasn’t even an attempt made until Monday morning.

I also apologize if I’m being highly critical of a difficult situation. I understand it was the weekend and maintenance might not be staffed on weekends, but if that’s so then the university needs to take notice of the driving conditions on campus and make sure there is some kind of on-call maintenance for winter months or contract a snow removal company outside of the university.

I hope the appropriate people take notice of this and realize it’s a hazard to keep a parking lot in that bad of condition for several days. People could end up getting hurt on account of the big piles of snow and the slick driving conditions.

Sincerely,

Ashly Linscheid, sophomore