Homeowners hoping for a tax break after a mild winter and a lighter workload for municipal works crews can expect to be disappointed. Compared with last year, this winter dropped only about a third as much snow on the capital region. Area towns, though, are reporting minimal surplus, if any, in their winter maintenance budgets.
Snowfall in the Concord area came in about 90 inches this time last year, compared with this year’s 30 inches. Hopkinton ended 2015 with a slight surplus in this area of the budget, about $7,000 out of $690,000 for all highway and street maintenance work.
But this year’s mild winter does not mean there will be a massive surplus in the public works budget, said Hopkinton Public Works Director Dan Blanchette.
“The issue most people don’t know is just because you didn’t get a lot of snow, it doesn’t mean you had an easy winter,” Blanchette said.
Hopkinton budgets for the calendar year, and it reserved some money for the beginning of next winter. But no one could say just how much was spent so far and how much is left over for the end of the year.
“We do have some money left, but I still have another two months of winter left in my budget with November and December, which you can easily get hammered on,” Blanchette said, citing snowstorms on Thanksgiving in 2014 and Halloween in 2011 that paralyzed cities and towns across the region for days.
Chichester Road Agent Jim Plunkett said the strain this year was not on labor – as is the case for heavy plowing – but on materials instead.
“This year was a material winter, so we a lot of material down this year, but we didn’t really plow anything,” Plunkett said. “Every time there’s a little bit of snow or ice, you’re putting material down.”
Rain throughout the cold months can be just as challenging as heavy snowfall, Blanchette said. Gravel roads freeze easily, and crews need to quickly spread sand to keep the roads safe.
“We have 40 miles of gravel roads in town,” Blanchette said. “Every time it rains, there’s ice.”
Tom Weston, Henniker’s road agent, echoed Blanchette’s sentiments, saying more materials are required to handle frozen streets and wet weather.
“It definitely has been mild, but mild is one thing,” Weston said. “We actually go through more material with freezing drizzle.”
The Henniker road crew, which received a new highway garage and fleet of equipment after a fire ripped through the old garage last year, has spent more time sanding and salting roads than plowing snow, Weston said.
In Concord, Public Works Director Chip Chesley expects there will be a savings in the budget on downtown snow removal.
While officials in some towns said there will be some savings in overtime, taxpayers probably won’t see it reflected on their tax rate. And if they do, it likely won’t be significant.
Tom Clow, vice chairman of the Weare select board, said any surplus would go back into the general fund to be applied to next year’s budget. In Hopkinton, where the budget cycle ends in December, officials are hesitant to say how much, if any, money will be leftover until they see what happens in the fall.
Plunkett said his department in Chichester had to put off some plans last year to compensate for the unexpected overtime, so he’s looking to catch up this year.
“You’ve gotta plan sometime, you know? I’m running on a shoestring,” he said.
(Nick Reid contributed to this report. Nick Stoico can be reached at 369-3314, nstoico@cmonitor.com or on Twitter @NickStoico.)