The City of North Bay plowed through 300 submissions and on Monday they rolled out the winning five names from the City's first-ever name the snowplow competition.
During a media event at the North Bay Public Works facility, the plows sporting their fresh paint jobs with their names were rolled up during a media conference.
The freshly painted trucks now own the following new names:
- Ctrl Salt Delete
- Catch My Drift
- Goon Makwa (Ojibwe translation for Snow Bear)
- Fast and Flurrious
- Snowminator
See related: 300 submissions to name city snowplows
The contest started last spring when the City of North Bay came up with the call for submission for the "name the snowplow" competition. Then, in early October the City announced that 300 creative name suggestions had been sent in.
Maggie Horsfield, North Bay's deputy mayor, says the contest brought the community together.
"I think it will be fun seeing them drive around town, they are more than just the writing on the side, they have some flair to them as well," she said.
"It is community engagement having that chance for the community to engage with the city, the city to engage with the community just to see what could come out of if and having that many submissions and votes I think shows you that the community does want to engage and they did come up with some really great submissions."
Scott Franks is the manager of roads, traffic, and landfill operations with the City of North Bay. He says snowplow drivers had actually created in-house names for their snowplows in the past.
"We saw some other communities doing it and we thought it was a great way to have public engagement and have fun with winter," he said.
"We know a lot of people don't enjoy what winter brings and the challenges it brings. We put this out as a contest to name the plow. We had 300 name suggestions for the contest and when it came down to the final voting there were 600 votes from the public to vote on the top choices."
Franks believes this is just the start of what the city hopes will be an annual event.
"In the years to come, we plan on doing this again," he said.
"We did five this year and the plan is to do another five next year until we get caught up," added Franks noting they have 16 plows in the City of North Bay's fleet.
"We also have other heavy trucks like graters and loaders so the idea is to name everything by the time we are done. We will continue to name them as we get new equipment replacing the older equipment that we are retiring so we will keep doing it as we move forward."
