Staff Writer

 Todd Toussaint and Kevin Renk recently won the “roadeo” state championship, but they didn’t ride any bulls.

The Kennebunk Public Works Department employees competed in a snowplow roadeo – the name is shorthand for “road rodeo” – and are training for the national title in September.

“It’s like a little obstacle course, they set up cones and you can’t hit the cones,” Renk said.

Renk and Toussaint said the annual contest attracts two-person teams from around the state.

Unlike many team sports, the two 20-year public works employees don’t practice in the off-season. They rely on winter weather and their goal of not damaging property to keep plows where they need to be.

The obstacle course consists of cones and platforms of varying lengths with objects on top. The goal is to have one member of the team drive and avoid the cones and the other to operate the plow wing to cleanly knock objects off the platform.

The course is supposed to mimic similar situations road crews would find on the street. Cones represent parked cars and objects represent mailboxes and other hurdles that may be in the way of the wing.

Sometimes in real life and in the race, the drivers don’t always have the best luck avoiding obstacles.

“Well, I’ve hit mostly mailboxes but most of the time it’s snow coming off the back of the plow,” Renk said. “I’ve clipped the rear end of a couple of cars, but people usually hear that.”

One perk of working on a busy road with parked cars and obstacles is the experience some other competitors, mainly from the state highway department, don’t get.

“For them it’s just a straight shot,” Toussaint said.

Before facing the highway department and other teams in the state, Toussaint and Renk had to get through the York County roadeo.

Kennebunk Public Works Department took both first and second place.

“We let them win,” Renk joked about coming in second to some of his co-workers.

In September, the Maine Chapter of the American Public Works Association will fly the team to Colorado to compete in the national roadeo, called the Western Snow and Ice Conference. There they will face steep competition against teams including those from Colorado, which have won the last six years in the single-axel division, the division in which Kennebunk will compete.

For the rest of the summer Toussaint and Renk will not practice in a plow. Instead they will study driving laws and parts of the truck. The competition is a little different in Colorado: Both teammates must complete an obstacle course, but they also must take a written quiz and conduct a safety examination of the truck for loose lug nuts and wiper blades.

No matter what happens in Colorado, the duo will still be heroes on the streets of Kennebunk where they now face their own obstacle course: a new Main Street, complete with extended sidewalks known in town as “bumpouts” that jut into the road.

“I plow Main Street and I actually think it’s not that big of a deal. We’ll go out at 11 or 12 at night and drop the wing and zoom in and out up through there,” Toussaint said, confident no sidewalk bump out could get in his way.

Staff Writer Suzanne Hodgson can be reached at 282-4337, ext. 233.