The unseasonably warm and dry winter hasn’t just made things easier for commuters in Tooele County making the daily trek to work.
It’s also made work for local snowplow crews easier and resulted in higher than usual reserves as the winter months wind down, according to state and local public works departments.
For Tooele City, the mild winter has seen a stark decrease in road salt usage compared to previous years, according to Jim Bolser, Department of Public Works director. So far the city has used only about 20 percent of its annual salt budget, he said in an email.
“Last year, which wasn’t exactly a wet year, we used somewhere in the range of 75 [percent] and the year before we fell just short of utilizing the entire road salt budget,” Bolser said.
Grantsville has used less than 55 tons of salt this year, according to Public Works Director Larry Bolinder in an email. That’s less than in previous years, he said, though the budgetary savings aren’t the only consideration.
“I would rather have the snowpack,” he said.
While the Utah Department of Transportation doesn’t track salt and overtime hours by county, Region 2 used 155 snow plows and 282 tons of salt in Tooele, Salt Lake and Summit counties during the March 3 snowstorm.
UDOT spokesman John Gleason said the warm temperatures have definitely had an impact on the state level.
“The greatest effect of the mild winter has been our ability to get out and tackle road maintenance,” he said.
Tooele has also been able to address its road maintenance needs due to the mild winter, Bolser said. The public works department has spent about the same total over the winter months, but the majority of the funds are coming from the asphalt budget instead, he said.
With major road construction projects planned for the warmer months, doing some projects early could ease the burden on residents later, Bolser said.
“It has been good to get some of this extra work done at this time because there are some roads that really need it that we haven’t been able to get to as we would like,” he said. “We’d like to minimize the impact of our work on the citizens to not make it any worse than we have to.”
The state has also seen the benefit of having its plow crews available for other work. Since UDOT employs its snowplow drivers full-time, they do other road work for the state, Gleason said.
“It’s been a positive in that we can address some maintenance,” he said.
Public works employees for Tooele City work overtime for a number of reasons, including after hour call outs, Bolser said. So far there has only been two or three times this winter that city employees have earned overtime due to snow, he said.
While the municipalities have been saving money with less salt and overtime usage, Bolinder cautioned the savings might not go very far toward other DPW projects.
“With the cost of road repairs the amount we saved would not go that far,” he said.