Winter Breaks Budgets and Rules the Road

By SUSAN SAULNY

Published: January 8, 2010

CHICAGO — There’s the gold standard of snow and ice removal on major roads in the Midwest — asphalt, plowed smooth and salted for easy driving.

And then there’s the reality this year across the region, and in the Northeast, too, where drivers might be lucky to see bare pavement, and some roads are considered good enough if they have a single defined rut for the tires on one side of a vehicle. A “one-wheel path,” in industry parlance.

With states and localities facing budget cuts in a time of economic crisis, the early onset of severe storms bringing heavy, wet snow is wreaking havoc on already strained resources and raising concerns about public safety.

Enlarge This Image

Tim Hynds/Sioux City Journal, via Associated Press

Clearing a five-foot drift near Moville, Iowa, that closed Highway 20 Thursday night and Friday.

“Each snowflake looks like a dollar sign floating down,” said Barbara Whitmore, the town clerk in Genesee, Wis., 30 miles west of Milwaukee. “We are basically now trying to just do hills, curves and intersections rather than entire roads for salting. Everything is plowed but might not get down to bare concrete. People like to see the salt so it gets down to bare concrete, but the cost is too high.”

Many other counties, cities and states across the regions are also feeling the pinch of expensive storm cleanup — rationing of salt, not plowing side roads, canceling public works projects for fear of running out of money to clear the roads.

In Kansas, state workers are no longer plowing for a perfectly clear path on weekends or after business hours, except on Interstate highways. “Our budgets have been cut, and people will notice it on the highways this year,” said Steve Swartz, a spokesman for the state’s Transportation Department. “In years past, we’d continue to pay our operators until we got down to bare pavement everywhere, at all times.”

Minneapolis cut more than $1 million from its $8.4 million snow removal budget by eliminating 54 full-time positions. (Those employees are still on reserve and receiving benefits, and, as such, are required to help clear snow when needed.)

In Iowa, Des Moines’s $3 million snow removal budget is supposed to last the winter, but with the snowstorm that hit Thursday, the city has already used the entire budget. “We will have exhausted it by the end of this event,” Bill Stowe, the director of public works, said Friday. “Yesterday, we had six additional inches and 30-mile-per-hour winds. We’re done.”

In Waltham, Mass., a suburb of Boston, Mayor Jeannette A. McCarthy said the town had nearly depleted its $400,000 snow removal budget after a storm last weekend. It will now have to ask the City Council for more money, she said.

In Kansas City, Mo., the $2.5 million allocated for the entire winter’s snow removal budget, including overtime pay for workers and the chemicals used to combat the snow, has been spent.

“Our snow budget is gone,” said Dennis Gagnon, a spokesman for the city’s Public Works Department. “We’ve used as much in the last three weeks that we expect to use in a full year. It has been a struggle.”

The department will have to dip into a contingency fund, which is smaller than usual because of the recession. “Times were already tight,” Mr. Gagnon said. “Finding this money under the mattress is not going to be easy.”

Beyond transportation departments, the ranks of first responders had already been reduced in some areas because of budget cuts and mandatory leave. In some states, troopers and highway patrol officers are having a hard time keeping up with accidents on unusually slick roads.

The number of Iowa troopers is down to 379 this year from 455 about 10 years ago, said Courtney Greene, chief of the Iowa Public Safety Department’s public information bureau.

“We don’t have enough officers to handle all the accidents,” said Doug Cutts, a trooper with the Iowa State Patrol. “We had multicar pileups, up to 10 vehicles involved in crashes. We just went from one crash to the next crash to the next crash.”

At least 13 weather-related deaths were reported this week by local authorities nationwide, with some clustered in the Southeast, where snowfall was unexpectedly heavy on Thursday. Deaths were reported in Georgia, Mississippi, Missouri, South Carolina, Tennessee and Ohio. Several of them were the result of accidents on the roads.

“It’s very difficult driving,” said Mayor R. T. Rybak of Minneapolis. “We are hoping for a melt, or least a little bit of a break in this incredibly harsh weather.”

Despite budget constraints, many communities have not changed their immediate routines. But they are bracing for consequences later in the year.

In some places, that could mean fewer road maintenance projects and repairs or less painting and mowing maintenance.

“We will move money to respond because we view this as an emergency response,” said Mr. Stowe, in Des Moines. “We wouldn’t ask firefighters to use less water or police officers to use less ammunition in response to an emergency.”

In Kansas, Mr. Swartz said: “We recognize that snow and ice removal is a top priority for safety, and to keep people and goods moving. We tried to make cuts that protect those functions. It will mean that that we probably can’t do other things not snow-related. It will be absorbed in our operations budget some other way.”

In the meantime, people are slogging through.

Marveleen Peterson, 80, a retired nurse, says she is reluctant take her Cadillac on the roads in Minneapolis, but she still has to buy groceries and run errands.

“I have not driven very far since Christmas,” Ms. Peterson said. “I am trying to be independent, and so far I’ve done fairly well in trying to take care of my errands. But if this continues like this all winter, then I may feel a little sorry for myself.”

Reporting was contributed by Robbie Brown from Atlanta, Christina Capecchi from Minneapolis and Emma Graves Fitzsimmons from Chicago.