‘You just take care of home:’ City employees in small town work together to clear streets, sidewalks
By Nathan Vickers
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LECOMPTON, Kansas (KCTV) — A city block may as well be a mile when you’re the only plow in town.
Rance Roberts fills that role as the utilities supervisor of Lecompton. He is one of just two full-time city employees. When snow blankets the town, he’s the one working the long hours required to scrape it off.
“As long as you don’t have any breakdowns, you’re in good shape,” he said. “It’s slick underneath but, by the end of the day, I’ll get it.”
Lecompton’s other full-time employee, Lynley Sanford, is the city clerk. She normally doesn’t come in to the office on Thursdays, but when this storm hit the town she braved the snow, shovel in hand.
“I thought I’d come help him out,” Sanford said, gesturing to Roberts. “I didn’t want to see him doing it all by himself.”
She was working on shoveling the sidewalks around city hall and the town’s community center, where a meeting was scheduled that night.
“You just take care of home,” she said. “You take care of where you live.”
At one point in the day, Roberts got a call from Leon Bidinger, a maintenance worker at the school. Bidinger had gotten his own plow truck stuck in the deep snow.
Roberts was there in a few minutes to pull him out.
“He’s the best thing to happen to Lecompton in a long time,” Bidinger said afterward.
Roberts didn’t seem to mind the long day in the snow. He said he felt appreciated in Lecompton as he scraped street after street.
“We have a good town here,” he said.
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