Residents hit with a 13% tax hike made it clear to city officials that they’re fed up with the massive snowbanks and poorly cleared roads and sidewalks that have limited their ability to get around Boston or even leave their homes for weeks on end.

“The conditions this year around snow removal have not been good,” longtime South End resident Jonathan Alves said Tuesday at a City Council hearing. “Overall, it’s not acceptable.”

The hearing was expected to focus on snow-removal proposals put forward by three councilors, but quickly devolved into a community bitch-fest. Residents and at least one councilor questioned how the much larger New York City was able to dig out so much faster than Boston with a similar amount of snow.

“I was just in New York this weekend, and it didn’t even look like it snowed in New York, juxtaposed to what we’re still seeing in Boston,” Councilor-at-Large Julia Mejia said, adding in a subtle dig at Mayor Michelle Wu, “So, I want to shout out to the mayor of New York City for cleaning it up as quickly as he did.”

The rookie socialist mayor of New York City Zohran Mamdani cited Wu as a role model during his campaign last year, but Mejia wasn’t the only councilor to suggest that Boston’s mayor should now be looking to him for inspiration — as far as this winter’s snow removal efforts are concerned.

North of 60 inches have fallen in Boston this winter, mainly due to two major storms that occurred in late January and February.

Councilor Enrique Pepén, usually seen as a strong ally of the mayor, said his office “is looking into what New York City did” as it relates to the Mamdani paying residents $30 an hour to volunteer for an emergency snow shovelers program after last month’s blizzard.

Pepén’s proposal for the day’s hearing centered around a similar program, for “the creation of a snow corps or seasonal workers” to help shovel snow.

“We saw what New York City was able to implement; there was a lot of excitement behind that,” Pepén said. “Obviously, they were a much bigger city, but I think that if we were able to learn a little bit about what they did at a smaller scale, perhaps maybe we can implement it here going forward.”

Ford Cavallari, chairman of the Alliance of Downtown Civic Organizations, offered the harshest critique of Boston’s inability to keep pace with the Big Apple after this year’s two massive snowstorms — though it came during public testimony after Mayor Wu’s team had already booked it out of the Council hearing.

“New York City had excellent snow removal with a similar amount of snow,” Cavallari said. “They are possibly going to get a 9.5% property tax hike. We are getting a certain 13% property tax hike, and … we had horrible snow removal.

“I just want us to be very clear-eyed that we need improvements,” Cavallari added. “We need metrics. We need to define what success is and we are far from it.”

Other residents expressed frustration as Wu administration officials pooh-poohed not only Pepén’s snow-removal proposal, due to a lack of capacity, but ideas put forward by Councilors Brian Worrell and Ed Flynn, who chaired the hearing.

“Throughout the testimony today, it seemed like the people testifying were saying there’s nothing we can do,” Hayden Seager, a Back Bay resident and member of the Boston Cyclists Union, said. “I don’t know. To me, it seems like you can look to other municipalities to find ideas. Like, are we the only city that has snow in it? Probably not.”

Worrell, like Pepén, favors the creation of a snow corps, which matches volunteers with seniors and disabled persons who, per his hearing order, don’t have the physical ability to remove snow as required and can be stuck at home for days after a storm. He said cities like Baltimore and Chicago have such a program.

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Flynn is calling for the city to purchase snow melting machines, which he said have been used effectively in New York City this winter.

Interim Chief of Streets Nick Gove said the city has been renting snow melting machines for the past 11 years, and has rented four this winter. The hourly cost to rent and operate the machines has been $2,500 to $4,800, he said.

Gove said the city has explored purchasing snow melting machines in the past, and even solicited bids in 2023 or 2024, “but they’re not cheap.”

“These are assets that can run well over half a million dollars a piece,” Gove said. “Then there’s maintenance costs associated with that as well. We haven’t had a chance to do a full accounting of whether it would have made sense to rent or own this year. That will certainly be part of our due diligence.”