At three in the morning the parking lots along Bay City's riverfront sit empty and blue, and that is the hour Alliance Contracting & Design Inc goes to work. Plowing lots, opening entrances and walkways, spreading salt where the wind has glazed the pavement — all of it finished before the first car turns in. Snow here arrives sideways as often as it falls, driven off Saginaw Bay across open ground until it packs against every curb and doorway. Stacking it where it belongs, so delivery trucks can still swing wide, is half the craft. By sunrise the lot is black and wet and the day begins as though winter never came through.