Wednesday's snowstorm will push the city’s plowing costs past the $780,000 budgeted for the entire winter, officials said.
Public Works Director Walter Veselka said he figures the city will wind up about $300,000 short by the time the last snowflakes vanish in the spring breeze.
Though the amount of snow this winter has been normal, he said, many of the storms have fallen on holidays and weekends, when plow operators earn overtime or even double time.
The fiscal situation would be even worse were it not for the changeover this year from the old salt and sand mix to a new treated salt that has proven more effective and cheaper, Veselka said.
“It’s worked very well putting out less material,” Veselka said.
Mayor Art Ward has repeatedly said this winter that residents are happy with the snow removal efforts. He praised public works crews that have put in long hours to battle some difficult storms.
The city will have to dip into its reserves to pay the extra plowing costs, finance officials said.. That makes it tougher to end the fiscal year in the black.
Veselka said an advantage of the new treated salt material is that spring street cleaning should go much faster because there is so much less sand on the roads. It also makes cleaning out catch basins quicker, he said.
This may be the last winter the city uses sand routinely during the winter.
It is using treated salt throughout the city for the first round of putting material down on roads, but once the trucks have used it up in the Chippens Hill and west Bristol areas, old stores of sand and salt are tapped.
Veselka said that beginning next winter, the sand won’t be used. The old material that’s likely to be left over, he said, will be given out to residents.
What makes the new technology particularly nice for the city is that it can no longer mine its own sand. Its permit is running out so if it wanted to keep using sand it would need to buy it or try to get the permit renewed, which might not happen.
Veselka said that public works uses the treated salt on the streets before the snow falls – or at least before it gets packed down – because that works best.
For example, he said Tuesday, he plans to start putting out the treated salt at about 2 a.m. tonight on the busiest roads and by 6 a.m. on side streets in order to make sure it’s on the pavement by the time there’s much snow there.
It is much more effective that way, Veselka said.
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Copyright 2009. All rights reserved.
Contact Steve Collins at scollins@bristolpress.com
16 comments:
Overtime and double time shouldn't even be an option. Call in a new crew if the weather gets to be that bad where it requires longer shifts. Yet another misuse of funds in our lovely city
If it happens overnight and on the weekends it's you're going to pay more. That's reality. It would be true of nearly any private business as well.
Weather issues vary quite from year to year and are largely unpredictable. Some years you'll have a surplus and some years you'll have a deficit. It's not a misuse of funds, it's life.
Thank the unions for this one.
Sadly, any time it's outside of the regular working hours during the 5 day work week, it's over/double time for them.
Quite lucky, aren't they?
Weekends and nights are the same every year. Budget accordingly.
In the private sector people work second, third, and weekend shifts, and they are not paid overtime/double time. There are plenty of people out there who will happily work for regular wages on nights or weekends.
Let me add a little clarity to this... The city workers who plow snow at night or on the weekend are also at work Monday to Friday during normal hours. They have jobs to do when it's not snowing.
So when they're called in at night or for weekend storms, they're over their normal hours. It's overtime, by law and by contract. And it should be.
And I really doubt any of you want the city to hire more people so that some could be available at normal pay at odd hours.
Veselka, the public works director, told me that after one storm this winter than went from Friday to Sunday, some of the exhausted workers took vacation days on Monday because they'd had no chance to rest before that.
You're not thinking about how people are giving up hoidays at home with their family and getting up in the middle of the night after a long day at work in order to go out in crummy weather and clear snow so that the rest of us can get around.
I think the workers deserve credit for what they've done this year.
If you want to offer tips to managers to handle things better, go ahead. But be nice to the folks who are doing the work.
Oh, and the person who wants the city to "budget accordingly" -- do you really want the city to put the maximum possible snow budget into its spending plan each year? That would mean extra taxes almost every year in order to cope with the rare excessively expensive winter. That makes no sense at all.
Steve, why don't you show the amount budgetted each of the past 8-10 years, so we can compare.
Just think how the snow removal budget would be clobbered if we hadn't caused all this global warming! :)
Steve, you're missing the point. You don't need to use the regular PW workers for extra hours and pay them overtime. Snow removal can be subcontracted. In an economy like this there are willing workers with the necessary licecenses who can plow the streets off hours.
But it's probably a union contract agreement that says the city must first offer overtime to regular city workers before subcontracting. And there will always be union workers willing to grab the valuable overtime, where they can earn $40 an hour to sit in their truck on the side of the road and drink coffee. 8 hours on the job, 16 hours worth of pay, only 4 hours of production. Not all workers abuse it like that, only a handfull, but it should not happen at all. But if you report stuff like that, bad things happen because those workers stick together.
This is another example of how unions are killing us.
Thank the Unions for the double time & overtime. Was written into the contracts. Unions are the worst for taxpayers. Unions create lazy workers and "not my job" attitudes. You ask your employee to do something, and they cry to the union. Time for the unions to make big cutbacks too!
Peter L.
Steve,
Former Secretary of Labor, Robert Reich, has a different take on the unions. It's today's topic.
Here's the link:
http://robertreich.blogspot.com/
If you call the furnace guy in the middle of the night because you don't have heat, you don't think that "Private Sector" guy won't charge you extra?
Looks like Steve is all for the Unions too? Remind me not to vote for you if you ever run for Mayor, LOL....You know we love ya man
Steve is for treating people fairly, not smearing them wholesale on a website. I happen to agree with finance board member John Smith, who said last night that too many in government don't realize how awful things are out in the ret of the world. But the economic distress and fear that most of us are feeling is no reason to assail workers for getting overtime when they're plowing in the middle of the night after a long week of work.
The person who said the city could contract out more of the plowing offers a fair point. That's a policy criticism, not just a mean-spirited attack on public works employees.
Why doesn't the state contract with a private entity for all snow removal? It could be a fixed contract based on the average snow removal requirements over the past say 10 or 15 years. On light snow years, the contractor makes more than it would during heavy storm years, but the government can have a known budget each year. In fact, nearly everything performed by the state in the areas of infrastructure maintenance could be performed by private contractors.
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