Snow Causing Problems for Many Towns

listen:

( nats-snow blower)
It’s an all too familiar sound this winter…the snow blowers,(nat sound) the sidewalk tractors, and even the shoveling (nat sound)
For city workers in Concord, as in other municipalities, it’s a never ending job.
(we have a large snow dump and for the first time it’s filled)
That’s Chip Chesley, General Services Director in Concord.
He says the snow just keeps piling up.
(we’ve filled one snow dump down on Manchester street, and now we’ve got a secondary site that we’ve located and we’re filling that up right now.)
Concord has seen almost 100 inches of snow.
While it doesn’t top the record of 122 inches set back in 1874, it’s still in the top 10 of heaviest snowfalls in recorded history.
Finding a place to store all the snow is one issue, but finding enough money to pay for the removal is quite another.
Chesley says his department has a 1.1 million dollar budget, but with all the snow, he’ll have to ask for an additional 300-thousand dollars.
(you’re just really trying to deploy your services as effectively as you can, given we’re at storm 33 and normally we budget for 20, that’s well over a 50-percent increase in the number of events)
In Hanover, some public works department officials say they think the storage for snow is the fullest it’s been in about 20 years.
Hanover Public Works Director Pete Kulbacki.
(eventually we’ll run out of space, and they’ll be some areas we won’t be able to pick up we’ll have to cut back on what our areas of snow removal will be, that’s a lot of the downtown which frees up a lot of the parking spaces)
Hanover has had a particularly difficult time this winter – Kulbacki says his department has run out of money for overtime pay and money for materials like sand and salt.
(there was a period of time when we couldn’t get salt, then the prices jumped through the roof when the demand went up and we were able to get it, but the prices were a good 50 to 60 percent higher than we’ve been paying in the past, then it kept climbing to almost 90 percent.)
Right now Hanover public works has only about 25-percent of its entire winter budget left.
Kulbacki says they may not get to projects planned for this spring.
(after the winter we have a spring roads program where we actually put gravel on some roads that are muddy in the spring time, and we’ll have to look at cutting back some.)
Laconia this winter has already gone over budget for equipment, materials and payment for outside contractors who clear some parking lots.
The city keeps track of snow fall amounts, and while it normally sees 60 inches in the winter, this year Laconia has had more than twice that amount, a whopping 125 inches.
Public Works Director Paul Moynihan says because snow doesn’t often fall during working hours, their overtime budget is strained and they’ve already had to change the way they remove snow.
( We’ve had to do it during regular work hours where it’s much more efficient if we can do it at night time, and if the winter budget isn’t expended that’s normally what we do, we try to do snow removal between midnight and five am when the traffic is very light, but we haven’t been able to do that.)
Moynihan says part of the problem is that winter storms seem to come back to back, with little time to remove snow in between.
The problem is compounded by low temperatures that don’t melt the snow.
And technically, there’s still three weeks of winter left.
Residents of Laconia and many other towns across the state may just have to deal with huge snow banks and narrower streets and of course, this….
(Sound snow blower..)
And then comes the melting season.
For NHPR news, I’m Amy Quinton.