Winter service in Des Moines

Two sidewalks, one of them enclosed

Downtown Des Moines has a second pavement one storey up. The city’s engineering department describes it as “more than 4 miles of climate-controlled pathways” — 4.2 miles (6.8 km), connecting 55 buildings and 12 parking ramps — and dates the first bridge to 1971, across Fifth Avenue.

It is written into the Municipal Code. Sec. 102-318, in the form adopted by Ordinance 15,000 (PDF) in March 2011, declares the skywalk “an integral part of the transportation system”, one that lets pedestrians move “in an enclosed second story skywalk system protected from adverse weather and vehicles”. Sec. 102-330 sets the hours: “between the hours of 6:00 a.m. and 2:00 a.m. seven days a week”, with a Skywalk Committee able to extend or reduce them. The ordinance text is from 2011; the city’s skywalk page is the place to check the hours in force.

At street level the ordinary rule applies: the abutting owner or tenant clears the walk within 48 hours. A downtown block in January therefore runs on two systems at once — an enclosed public walkway the ordinance keeps open twenty hours a day, and an outdoor pavement the abutter answers for. And downtown is the one zone where the plow does not move the cars: Sec. 114-236(g) allows parking in the central business district during city-wide snow removal, which the city’s street categories page puts as “no weather-related parking restrictions in the central business district of downtown Des Moines during normal snow plow operations”.

The rest of the city works differently.

Thirty-six inches, and a winter measured in streaks

Des Moines records 36.5 inches (93 cm) of snow in an average season on the 1991–2020 normals at Des Moines International Airport, in the Weather Service office’s own climate summary (PDF). February is the snowiest month at 10.2 inches, ahead of January’s 9.4. The city’s snow operations fact sheet (PDF) plans against a rounder 33 inches.

The averages are the least interesting part of a record that runs from 1878. The snowiest season, 1911–12, delivered 72.0 inches (183 cm) — twice the normal — and the least snowy, 1965–66, managed 8.3. The snowiest single day was 1 January 1942, 19.8 inches (50 cm). The all-time low is −30 °F (−34 °C), on 5 January 1884.

The figures that describe the winter most clearly are the streaks. In 1978 the temperature failed to rise above freezing for 47 consecutive days, from 8 January to 23 February. In 2009–10 the snow cover held for 94 consecutive days, 7 December to 10 March — three months in which nothing that fell went away.

The winter of 2023–24 was the warmest in the whole series, at 33.1 °F. It also contained the January 2024 blizzard week. That is the honest way to describe the climate here: a mild season is not a quiet one.

A prairie city: wind and drift, not hills

Des Moines sits at the confluence of the Raccoon and Des Moines rivers, at about 850 feet (260 m). It is not a hill city. The Raccoon meets the Des Moines at 784 feet, so the ground between the rivers and the city’s mean elevation rises about 65 feet (20 m); the one prominent rise is the Capitol’s, at East 9th Street and Grand Avenue, “set atop a hill” above the East Village and downtown.

What the record shows is what open ground does to falling snow. On 11–13 January 2024 the Weather Service office reported that “whiteout conditions developed on roadways, as blowing and drifting snow made travel nearly impossible for much of Friday and Saturday”, with a 48 mph (77 km/h) gust at the airport on the 13th. Then the cold: the Midwestern Regional Climate Center records two consecutive days with a wind chill of −40 °F, “which has happened just six other times since records began in 1948.”

The plowing problem here is the drift, and the wind chill on the crews, not the grade.

Forty-eight hours, counted from when the weather stops

The sidewalk rule is in Chapter 102, Article II, Division 3 of the Municipal Code, “Snow and Ice Removal”, Sections 102-121 to 102-135. Sec. 102-123 defines the “snow season” as 15 October to 15 April.

Sec. 102-124(a) is the operative text:

“The owner or tenant or lessee of any real estate abutting a public sidewalk shall remove snow and ice from the sidewalk within a reasonable time but in no case more than 48 hours following the cessation of the weather event by which such snow or ice was deposited; provided, however, that in extraordinary weather circumstances the director of public works or his or her designated representative may provide additional time for removal under this section.”

Two things in that sentence deserve a slow reading. The clock starts at the cessation of the weather event, not at the first flake — a two-day storm gives 48 hours from its end. And the duty falls on the owner or tenant or lessee; subsection (c) makes them “jointly and severally responsible for compliance with this division and jointly and severally liable for any fines or administrative penalties or assessments imposed”. A tenant in Des Moines is not a bystander to the sidewalk.

Where a multi-use trail doubles as the sidewalk, subsection (d) requires clearing only “a width of four feet”. Where ice “cannot be reasonably removed”, subsection (e) requires that, within the same 48 hours, it be kept “sprinkled with sand or deicing chemicals in such manner as to provide traction” — expressly not a substitute for removal “as soon as practical”.

Underneath the city rule is a state one. Iowa Code § 364.12 (PDF) makes the abutting owner responsible for the sidewalk “within a reasonable amount of time” and says the city’s general duty “does not include a duty to remove natural accumulations of snow or ice from the sidewalks”. The state says “reasonable”; the city turns it into 48 hours. Four of the cities around Des Moines turn the same sentence into 24.

Where the snow may and may not go

Sec. 102-126 is the section that most concerns anyone clearing a car park or driveway. Subsection (a): “No person shall remove or cause to be removed snow or ice from private property and deposit such snow or ice … upon any public right-of-way, street, avenue, alley, public square or other city property within the city.” Subsection (b) says the same of sidewalk snow pushed onto “the traveled portion” of a street, and subsection (c) names the one permitted place: “the public border area abutting such sidewalk or driveway” — the strip between the walk and the kerb.

For contractors who haul, Chapter 42, Article VIII, “Snow Disposal”, rewritten in full in September 2022, adds Sec. 42-426: “No person shall throw, deposit, place, drop or spill snow being hauled upon the streets, sidewalks, or other public rights-of-way.” As a municipal infraction that carries the general penalty in Sec. 1-15, up to $750 per violation and $1,000 for a repeat. The older “snow dump provisions” are gone; the code no longer describes city snow dumps.

The figure the code does not contain

Ask what a violation costs and the ordinance answers with a pointer rather than a number. Sec. 102-126.05(a) authorises the public works director, a designee or any police officer to impose an administrative penalty, and then: “The administrative penalty for such violations shall be as provided in the schedule of administrative penalties adopted by the city council by resolution.”

The numbers are on the city’s pages. The sidewalk snow removal page states a “$75 administrative penalty for a first offense and larger penalties for repeat violations over a period of three years”; the snow removal hub says snow from parking lots and driveways placed on the street is “subject to a $100 administrative penalty for a first offense”. The resolution itself was not located for this page; treat the figures as the city’s statement, not ordinance text.

Then the city may do the work. Under Sec. 102-129(a), after a notice giving “at least 24 hours to remove the snow or ice”, the city may remove it — without notice if an emergency has been declared. Sec. 102-131 makes “the actual cost” payable by the owner and “assessed against such real estate”, and Sec. 102-135 certifies it “to the county auditor for collection in the manner provided by law” — which § 364.12(2)(e) describes as “in the same manner as a property tax”, a road from sidewalk charge to tax roll that Milwaukee also runs.

Uncleared walks are reported through the city’s report-a-problem page or the myDSMmobile app; residents who cannot clear their own walk are directed to United Way 2-1-1.

Four blocks from a snow route, by design

The fact sheet gives the scale: a snow team of “nearly 200 men and women”, 100 pieces of equipment “from plows to loaders to graders and pick-ups”, working “24/7” across “more than 2,200 lane miles of streets” — 750 of them in the Snow Route system and 1,450 in snow districts or neighbourhoods. The 230 snow-route segments are mapped on a wall-size PDF.

The trigger is a forecast, not a measurement: “If snow accumulations are expected to be less than 2”, the City plows and salts ONLY the Snow Routes. If snow accumulations are expected to be 2” or greater, the City will plow the entire City AND salt the Snow Routes.” And the network is laid out to a stated rule — “All residences are no further than four blocks from a Snow Route, by design.”

The street categories page adds the order of work. Snow routes and hospital access streets have “first priority for salt application and snow removal” and are “normally plowed when snow accumulations exceed one inch”. Residential streets follow once the snow ends, “full width (curb-to-curb) where possible”; alleys that are a home’s primary access are cleared before the snowfall ends; cul-de-sacs need “special equipment”. The city holds 30,000 gallons of brine and a brine maker producing about 5,000 gallons an hour.

Iowa DOT, not the city, keeps I-235, I-35 and I-80: about 900 snowplows and “about 150,000 tons of salt on an ‘average’ season” statewide, on its winter operations page. Its winter operations administrator has put the calendar plainly: “the official start of winter for us each year is October 15, whether there is snow in the forecast or not” — the same date on which Sec. 102-123 opens the city’s snow season.

Snow routes, odd/even zones, and downtown

The parking rules for a storm are in Sec. 114-236, “Vehicle and parking restrictions in snow conditions”. Its first subsections are the least known: on a snow route with snow or ice on the surface it is “unlawful for the driver of a vehicle to impede or block traffic if the driving wheels of the vehicle are not equipped with snow tires, tire chains or nonslip differential”. Getting stuck on a snow route without them is itself a violation.

Subsection (d) prohibits parking on a snow route while clearing is in progress and until the street is cleared “curb to curb”. Subsection (e) does the same for the designated “odd/even side snow parking” zones during city-wide operations, and (f) says which side: odd-numbered dates on the odd-address side, even dates on the even side. The fine under (i) is $35. The city’s hub page adds towing, and states that “no parking will be allowed on residential streets during snow removal operations”, citing Chapter 114 — broader than the two subsections quoted, which name only snow routes and odd/even zones. This page reports both texts.

The zones themselves are in Sec. 114-4175: three, lettered A to C and drawn by street boundary. The city’s odd/even page names them as neighbourhoods — “Carpenter, Drake, Sherman Hill, and a portion of River Bend” — and in January 2020 the declared list had five. Three by boundary in the code, four by name today, five in 2020: the current city page is the one to check. On it, parking on odd dates is allowed in front of odd-numbered addresses “from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m.”, and the director puts the ordinance into effect on “total accumulation, prevailing conditions, and near-future forecasts”.

Ordinance 14,891 (PDF) of September 2009 introduced Division 11 as “snow priority streets” — 41 segments in the Waterbury neighbourhood, no parking “after 6:00 p.m. when snow-removal operations are in progress”, $35 — and the odd/even zones grew out of it. It is a lighter instrument than the three-day Snow Emergency in Minneapolis, and closer to the calendar rule in Rockford, though applied to named zones rather than city-wide.

And downtown, as above, keeps its parking.

Seven cities, two clocks

The metro runs on two sidewalk deadlines. Johnston — where the Weather Service’s Des Moines office actually sits — and Windsor Heights give 48 hours, like Des Moines. Ankeny, Urbandale, Clive and Altoona give 24. Altoona’s page uses Des Moines’s own phrase for the start of the clock — “within 24 hours following the cessation of the weather event” — and halves the number.

Storm parking fines come in four sizes within a few miles: $25 in Johnston and Windsor Heights, $35 in Des Moines and Urbandale, $40 in Ankeny, and $50 in West Des Moines, whose February 2026 snow ordinance was announced for all streets from 8 p.m. one evening to 5 p.m. the next.

Someone who lives in Windsor Heights and works downtown crosses two rulebooks on the way in. Madison makes the same point with a noon deadline inside a county of 24-hour rules; here it is 24 against 48, and the line is a city boundary you cannot see under snow.

Keeping a record against a 48-hour clock

Des Moines’s 48 hours run from the “cessation of the weather event”. That makes the weather itself part of the record: to show that a walk or a lot was cleared in time, you need to know when the snow stopped as much as when the shovel arrived — and after a two-day storm with drifting, the two are not obvious.

Wintertrace is self-hosted software for documenting winter service operations. Each operation records which site was attended, when and by whom, and what material went down; weather data is captured automatically at the start and end of every operation; and the result is a PDF service record with GPS track, weather data and photos. It runs on standard web hosting with PHP and MySQL, without a subscription, and your data stays on your server.

It does not decide when a weather event ended, and it is not a substitute for legal advice. What it keeps is the operational record — the time, the conditions, the pictures — so that months later a property manager in Sherman Hill, or a contractor with routes across three of the seven cities above, can say what was done and when, on the clock the ordinance actually uses.

A note on all of the above

This page is general information about winter service in Des Moines, Iowa, drawn from the city’s published pages, the Municipal Code of the City of Des Moines as published online in September 2026, the Iowa Code and National Weather Service records. It is not a substitute for legal advice, and it does not say what applies to any particular property. The penalty figures come from the city’s web pages rather than the ordinance, and the odd/even zones are described differently in the code and on the city’s pages. Check the city’s current pages and the ordinance text before relying on anything here.