City, county talk winter weather

• Please ... No more snow.

A City of Worthington truck unloads at the nearly full snow dump site on Sherwood Street near the filter plant Wednesday afternoon as they continue to clean up streets in the city.

Talk about it

WORTHINGTON — According to those who read the Old Farmer’s Almanac, southwest Minnesota is predicted to be pummeled with 40 inches of snow during the month of March. That is nearly as much as the region’s snowfall thus far this winter.

Whether or not the prediction comes true remains to be seen, but one thing is for certain — most residents, along with the city of Worthington and Nobles County, have seen enough of the white stuff for a while.

Fortunately, both the city and the county operate on a budget that follows the calendar year. That means the Christmas blizzard went on the 2009 books, and the snowstorms of January cut into the 2010 funds.

Where the two entities differ is that the county doesn’t have an actual budget for snow removal, while the city does.

“What we budget for is labor, overtime, sand, salt and fuel,” said Nobles County Public Works Director Stephen Schnieder. In 2009, the county spent $341,000 on labor and supplies, down from $468,000 in 2008, but still above the 10-year average of $303,000.

With nearly 10 months left in 2010, it’s impossible to gauge just what the county’s costs for snow removal will be. Schnieder said an estimated $303,000 has been spent in the first two months of this year on snow removal, and that includes some of the budgeted $26,000 for overtime costs.

“With the $26,000 we have, we already spent half of that during the month of January,” said Schnieder, adding that February costs aren’t in yet, but shouldn’t be too much different. The public works department’s budget was reduced by 15 percent this year at the request of Nobles County Commissioners, which also meant a 15 percent reduction in the overtime budget.

“I’m guessing we’ve used up a large portion of our budgeted overtime already this year,” he said.

While the overtime budget is for the entire year, Schnieder said the only reason they’d ever dip into the account during the summer would be because of a natural disaster, such as flooding or a tornado.

“The vast majority of our budget for overtime is strictly for snow and ice removal,” he said.

On the city side, Worthington City Administrator Craig Clark said they budgeted $182,232 for snow removal in 2009, and exceeded that by more than $22,000. As of Dec. 31, the total cost for snow removal in the city limits came to $204,406.

“Generally, we figure an average of 10 snowfalls a year,” said Clark of the way they calculate their snow removal budget. “Obviously, we’re well above that.”

The city can be somewhat flexible with the snowplow budget because it falls under the bigger umbrella of the public works budget. Clark said they will simply do less in other areas to make up for the added cost of snow removal. That will be the case in 2010, considering the city cut its snowplow budget to $156,971 this year.

The county also plans to trim spending in other areas of public works.

“We will adjust what we’re doing throughout the year,” said Schnieder. “If we buy more salt and sand, we may have less money available to buy other supplies, like gravel (or seal-coating).”

Both Schnieder and Clark agree that this has been a challenging winter for snow removal.

“The one that happened at Christmas was particularly difficult to accommodate, financially speaking,” said Clark, adding that they had overtime, holiday pay, a lot of snow and also blowing and drifting. The city has 10 employees who do snow plowing, and the county has 11 workers to clear snow.

“We worked almost every weekend from Christmas to the middle of February,” said Schnieder. “I think we had about nine days off.”

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