Area towns ran short, had to spend more on snow removal
By Jennifer Kohlhepp and Philip Sean Curran, Staff Writers
All the snow and cold this year has meant Princeton area towns have spent more than $662,000 collectively to buy salt and remove snow, local officials reported this week.
In Princeton, the town has spent about $165,000 to buy salt and $134,000 to pay overtime costs to clean up, officials said. The town will have to spend some $90,000 to resupply its salt stock.
During the last storm, Princeton, Montgomery and West Windsor had a limited supply of salt, with the shortage delaying when road crews treated municipal roads.
As a result, Princeton had to borrow from Princeton University and Lawrence, Township Manager Marc Dashield said. The school provided 25 tons of “road mix,” a combination of salt and sand, university spokesman Martin A. Mbugua said Tuesday.
“But oftentimes what happens is when we’re facing a shortage, it’s because everybody is facing a shortage,” Mayor Liz Lempert said Monday. “And it’s not even because we’ve misestimated how much we’re going to use. It’s that we have all these orders that have been promised that have not been delivered.”
Mr. Dashield said most towns buy from the same vendor under a co-op, so there is a lot of pressure for the supplier to fill all the orders. Mayor Lempert said that last year, there was a salt shortage “all up and down the East Coast” during the harsh winter.
“And we would be expecting a delivery of 300 tons (of salt) but would only get 100 tons,” she said.
Mr. Dashield has proposed the town build an additional salt dome on municipal land on River Road to have an emergency salt supply. He said he hoped the facility could be in place this year and ready for next winter. The town was in the midst of getting cost estimates for project, he said.
Montgomery Township, which has spent more than $200,000 on snow cleanup costs, including salting and plowing, also suffered from a lack of salt during the last snowstorm.
“Because there was not enough salt for every road in town, we selected main thoroughfares and did others in a priority order,” Business Administrator Donato Nieman said.
Each time it storms the township uses about 150 tons of salt throughout the town, sometimes doubling that if the town sends the spreaders out twice.
There is some salt left and the township is in the process of getting more.
“We’re husbanding our supply,” Mr. Nieman said, adding that two cold and stormy winters in a row put salt in high demand these past two years.
With Gov. Chris Christie recently announcing that he’s cutting the state’s snowplowing budget, Mr. Donato said he is concerned about Route 206.“The only impact would be Route 206 if we have an extensive storm in the winter next year. It could impact our town,” he said.
West Windsor’s Alex Drummond, public works director, said the township budgeted $163,000 in 2014 for snow cleanup.
“We will probably have to go into our snow trust, which is money set aside from years that there wasn’t a lot of snow,” Mr. Drummond said, adding that he did not know the amount in the snow trust and that the township’s Chief Financial Officer was out this week.
The Department of Public Works did a good job clearing roads this year but it was a challenging situation as it was also low on salt, Mr. Drummond said.
“The salt supplier wasn’t providing salt on a regular basis,” Mr. Drummond said. “We had to go out and truck our own.”
To truck its own salt, public works had to rent a second dump truck, according to Mr. Drummond. “This was a tough year,” he said. “The storms were shorter in duration.”
Rain prior to one of the last snowstorms washed residual salt away, complicating things even further with regard to the salt situation. The extreme cold temperatures were also difficult to deal with, he said. “There wasn’t one big storm but a lot of little storms that wear the crews out,” Mr. Drummond said.
Plainsboro had yet to respond to questions regarding snow cleanup as of press time.