City prepared for winter

Ben Ayers is no stranger to snow.

For 15 years, Ayers has operated a snowplow for the Monroe County Highway Maintenance Department. This winter, he has a 30-mile route in the Stanford, Ind., area, roughly seven miles outside Bloomington.

“It can be stressful,” Ayers said. “You are going down the road covered with snow, and once it piles up, you can’t even find the edge of the road. It makes it challenging.”

A snowy winter can also be demanding for the county budget.

“Our budget comes from the state gasoline tax,” said John Chambers, superintendent of the Monroe County Highway Maintenance

Department. “It fluctuates year to year, but it’s right around $4 million.”

The yearly budget covers street resurfacing, snow removal, fleet maintenance of all county-owned vehicles, street sweeping, dust and vegetation control, chip and sealing, grading gravel roads and sign maintenance.

However, Chambers said he is not worried about lack of money for snow removal, because the department can distribute money as needed based on its budget.

“We probably would never run out, due to the fact that we don’t have a snow-and-ice budget per se,” he said.

Chambers said the county has stockpiles of salt and sand mixtures to spread on county roadways.

“When we have big snows like we had a couple of weeks ago, with the 12 inches, what we do is plow,” Chambers said. “The plows leave salt or a salt solution in their wake.”

He said the major problem with the recent snowstorms has been piling the snow that was plowed off the streets.

“There’s simply nowhere to put the snow when it gets that deep,” he said.
Clearing ice is even more difficult and expensive, he said.

“Ice is a totally different ball game. We basically have to back through the whole area so we have traction,” Ayers said.

He said he remembers the snowy winter more than a decade ago when repeated snowfall depleted their resources.

“About 13 years ago, it just kept coming and coming,” he said. “We ran out of material, and we couldn’t get any in. We had to get chicken grit and put that down until we got more material.”

Susie Johnson, director of the Bloomington Public Works Department, has worked to ensure Bloomington won’t have to use any chicken grit this winter.

“That would be poor planning,” she said. “My goal is that that won’t ever happen.”

Public Works dictates the budget for the Street Department, which maintains the city streets by paving, patching, performing sidewalk repairs and street tree maintenance and snow plowing. In 2011, the street department was allotted a $3.8 million budget, according to city controller office records. Johnson estimated $4.5 million was used by the Street Department — the extra money came from additional Public Works funds.

In 2012, Public Works requested $1.2 million for asphalt and de-icing materials. The 2012 budget has not yet closed.

Each year, the city government starts from scratch in determining the budget. Money is allotted based on the planned capital projects and the priority of each department and division, she said.

Like Chambers, Johnson also said she does not believe a heavy winter will deplete the budget enough to prohibit the ability to afford snow plowing, though she said it could affect other projects.

“The way we budget the Street Department is that snow removal, concrete and asphalt are all out of the same category,” Johnson said.“If we have an extraordinarily snowy winter, we will cut back on projects on the roads in the summer.”

She said one of her first initiatives when first elected was to add a second pile of salt for snow removal. If these resources run low, she said the salt would be diluted.

“If we got down to a really low stockpile, we would begin to mix that with sand,” she said. However, sand is expensive to clean up, as it would entail running street sweepers in the spring, she added.

Though she said she predicts this winter will be snowier than last year’s, Bloomington is in good shape.

“Some years, the snow is with you. Some years, it’s against you,” she said.