This is the rule people get wrong most often, and the one that decides what a seasonal quote costs. In the two core cities the public sidewalk in front of your house is your responsibility on a clock. In several suburbs the city does it. Both are true at the same time, four miles apart.
Where a row says “not published,” that is exactly what it means: the city does not publish an hour-specific deadline. Confirm with the city rather than assuming the Minneapolis rule travels.
Minneapolis requires the entire width of the sidewalk cleared down to bare pavement across the entire property frontage. A shoveled path the width of a shovel does not comply. Inspections begin 24 hours after snowfall ends, or on a 311 complaint.
Corner properties carry substantially more. On top of two frontages, the corner owner must clear the curb cutouts and the crosswalk ramps, out to the street gutter — the exact stretch the city plow refills on its next pass. This is why a corner lot’s seasonal quote runs close to double an interior lot’s. The pricing effect, with numbers.
There is a separate and less known rule: clear a 36-inch-wide path from your garbage and recycling carts to the alley or curb. If carts are snowed in on collection day and it has not snowed in 48 hours, the charge is $30 per cart.
One relief worth knowing: property owners do not have to clear the snow piles city plows leave beyond the gutter at corners. City crews handle those after an emergency. The pile across your driveway apron is a different matter entirely.
Saint Paul’s deadline is the same 24 hours, full width, to bare pavement, and it applies identically to residential and commercial property. Enforcement is where it differs.
The process is complaint-driven, and the full warn, inspect, clear and assess cycle takes “at best five business days” — by which point it has usually snowed again and the cycle restarts with a new complaint. In the winter of 2018 the city logged about 7,000 complaints; roughly 80% resolved themselves before an inspector arrived and about 20% ended in city clearing and an assessment.
The consequence is predictable and worth stating plainly rather than moralizing about: some property owners, particularly commercial ones, have concluded it is cheaper to absorb an occasional $280 assessment than to pay for shoveling all winter. Whether that arithmetic works for you depends on how often you would actually be caught, and on whether you are comfortable with a pedestrian, a mail carrier or a wheelchair user meeting your frontage in the meantime.
Mention the frontage, the corner, the steps and the walk to the door. It is the difference between a $700 season and a $1,300 one.
Call (612) 712-4640 Get a Seasonal Quote
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