By Doug Fletcher,Staff Writer

AUBURN – Terri Brady does something that most people don’t. She walks everywhere she goes.

“I haven’t had a car for two years,” she says.

She’s 20 and a single mom. Her son, Shawn, is 1. In good weather, she can push him along in what she calls “a pretty nice stroller.”

Lately, though, she’s been loading him into a backpack-like carrier. Brady says she hasn’t had a choice in the matter. She can’t push his stroller through the snow covering the sidewalks around her home on Northern Avenue Heights.

It’s worse on Center Street, Brady adds. “It’s so dangerous,” she says, “because of the traffic.”

Auburn just got around to cleaning Center Street sidewalks on Thursday. Bob Belz, the city’s director of public works, said he considers getting snow off sidewalks to be an important part of what his department does. But it isn’t No. 1 on the list.

No. 1 is keeping the major streets open. No. 2 is clearing the feeder streets. Next are neighborhood roadways. Sidewalks follow, but again they’re prioritized. Those near schools are first, then neighborhood sidewalks leading to the school walks, and so on.

Center Street’s sidewalks are important, Belz says, but don’t expect them to be cleaned as soon as the snow stops falling.

“This is a week after the storm ended,” Brady counters. She said she’s been patient, but she still needs to get out to get milk and food for her son, And she says she isn’t alone. She’s seen other mothers walking in roadways with infants in their arms.

Belz isn’t keen on the idea of anyone walking along the sides of streets, especially in areas where there are sidewalks. But he also needs to be realistic. Crews working Thursday on Center Street’s sidewalks were into the second of their double shifts, he said. They had already worked much of the night.

He also notes that Center Street offers no places for snow storage. It’s plowed from the road onto sidewalks, which in turn often butt against retaining walls. And often, he adds, private plow trucks clearing out driveways push snow onto the sidewalks complicating matters.

“We’re working with the police on that,” he said.

Auburn doesn’t have an ordinance that requires landowners adjacent to sidewalks to clear them. Lewiston does, but only in its downtown area.

Brady, who sometimes walks from Auburn to college in Lewiston, said that city’s sidewalks are only marginally better than Auburn’s.

But she’s most concerned with the walks on Center Street and around the Great Falls Plaza, places where she finds herself walking a lot to pick up groceries and for other reasons.

“The city spends thousands of dollars on Christmas decorations but it can’t spend any on clearing off the sidewalks,” she complains.

Belz asks for patience and understanding.

And, he says, anyone with a particular problem – handicapped people for instance – should call public works to make supervisors aware of those problems so they can figure out a way to meet those needs.