Balmy Winter Has Local Governments Hoping for Savings

Halfway through the fifth-warmest winter on record in central Iowa, West Des Moines Public Works Director Bret Hodne thinks it’s safe to consider how different it will feel give rather than take from the city’s reserve fund.

Usually, at this point in the year, his department has spent weeks fighting against a season with a reputation for being so brutal that it has accumulated Twitter hash tags like #snowmageddon, #snowpocalypse and #snowzilla.

Unless the mostly wimpy winter develops a spine in the next couple of months, Hodne is on track to return most of the $500,000 budgeted for snow removal to the city general fund. In an austere budget climate where a bare-bones maintenance budget depends on nature cooperating, that’s no small thing, he said.

“With the current budget issues every public agency is facing, being able to return this money to the general fund helps offset other areas of the city budget with constraints and challenges,” Hodne said.

From Minnesota to Maine to Maryland to Ohio, weather patterns that Harry Hillaker, Iowa’s state climatologist, called “wacky” appear to be delivering big savings to municipalities like West Des Moines.

More often than not in Hodne’s 23 years with public works, the opposite has been true. By this time in most years, the department has spent about $250,000, or half, of its budget on materials, contractors and overtime for snowplow drivers. That doesn’t include fuel savings, which Hodne said are significant with 750 lane miles of pavement, plus gravel roads, to clear of snow.

For perspective, in the winter of 2009-2010, the second snowiest on record in the Des Moines metro area with snow remaining on the ground a record-setting 75 consecutive days, West Des Moines spent $600,000 on deicing materials. That’s double the normal annual cost.

Overtime costs also doubled that year. Fuel usage also soared, because some major arterial streets were plowed as many as five times during extraordinarily long storms, and Hodne had to ask for emergency reserve money to cover the additional costs.

“It’s nice, in a year like this, if we can put that back into city coffers, alleviate some stress and strain on the whole organization,” Hodne said.

“Wacky” Winter Has Municipalities Across the Country Seeing Green
West Des Moines officials aren’t alone in seeing a bit of green in what Iowa’s state climatologist Harry Hillaker called a “wacky” weather pattern.

“It’s not just here,” said Hillaker, who has been crunching the state’s weather data for more than 20 years. “There all kinds of contrasts around the country.

“We’re keeping our fingers crossed, and we might get lucky and not have that much snow from here on out,” he said. “It would be a very, very nice change compared with recent winters that were not only very cold, that kept that snow around. This has been a huge change.”

Hillaker threw a bit of a heavy, wet blanket of snow on Hodne’s optimism. His advice to cities: Don’t be caught with short salt supplies.

Historically in a La Niña winters, the first half is mild, and the second half is brutal, a pattern Hillaker said fits central Iowa’s weather so far this winter. Central Iowa may be basking the fifth-warmest winter to date, but the four other record-warm winters for the same period – 2007, 1966,1914 and 1932 – turned colder than normal in the second half of the season, he said.

“We’re not likely to see the second half as warm or have as little snow,” Hillaker said. “How much snow? It’s anybody’s guess on that thing. but the general pattern should be for colder, snowier weather thus far.”

Responding to March Blizzards Cheaper, Easier
Even if winter does eventually show up in West Des Moines, Hodne figures to end the year with surplus in the public works budget.

“I think we can be pretty confident we are going to probably come out of this pretty well this winter,” he said. “I’m looking at the 15-day forecast and there’s a minor event tonight and tomorrow, but then no precipitation at all. That gets us to the first of February, and then March is only a month away. Once I get to the first of March, I start breathing.”

It’s easier and cheaper to respond to a blizzard in March, a transitional month with historically higher amounts of snowfall.

“It can be snowier, but it also can be cheaper,” Hodne said. “Big snow events are typically followed by above-freezing temperatures, so we don’t have problems of running out of places to put snow and haul snow. Mother Nature helps us out, and we don’t have to apply a lot of chemicals. Whether you’re plowing two inches or 12 inches, you’re doing the same job.”

Mild Winter Means Fall Projects Continue
But he says wild climate swings and more catastrophic weather events during recent years make it difficult to accurately budget, and what appears to be a savings in the winter months could be wiped out a natural disaster later in the year.

“A lot of agencies, at the first of the year, have a good general idea of what it’s going to take to do their jobs,” Hodne said. “One of the tough parts of public works is that we’re so governed by the weather – we may have wild storms or tornadoes or blizzards – it’s very hard to calculate a set budget, so we try to budget on averages.”

The mild winter is delivering savings in less tangible ways, as well.

“This has almost been a continuation of fall work for us,” Hodne said. “We’ve gotten a lot of things done that are priority issues.”

By the numbers, city workers have spent:

• 1,500 hours crack-sealing projects
• 580 hours blading gravel roads in the city limits,
• 1,239 hours on sewer maintenance, a project that would normally be halted by sub-freezing temperatures.

“As the city’s grown, it’s never a matter of us running out of work,” Hodne said. “It’s like being on a farm, and the shifting of priorities with the weather. There are a lot of things we try to do in late fall – clearing vegetative materials and tree debris out of culverts and storm drains.

“There are numerous drainage structures in the city and it seems we never get caught up. This winter has extended the window on taking care of these issues, and were able to use our staff more productively than if we were out fighting snow.”