Winter storms don’t affect budget

County official says road cleanup money won’t need to be adjusted

Wednesday, February 10, 2010

— Winter weather had county road crews out early again Monday. But through the first six weeks of 2010, an official says budgets related to road cleanup won’t have to be altered.

There is no specific budget set aside for winter road cleanup in Benton County. Instead, the costs come out of the general fund, according to county administrator Greg Hines. With so much time and money being spent on clearing snow and ice off county roads recently, Hines said it does put a hold on other projects.

“It does slow us down with other things we needto do,” Hines said. “It’s been a bad start to the year, but it’s still nothing like the ice storm last year.”

With so much snow and ice to deal with already in 2010, county workers would appear to be wellprepared for the latest winter weather that hit Monday. The problem, though, is cleanup crews can’t always get to workon clearing roads until they’re covered.

While some preventive measures can’t be taken, others can. In the county, many hills, intersections and bridges were covered with a new calcium chloride and sand mix on Jan. 27 in anticipation of an ice storm on Jan. 28.

Hines said the new mixture used proved effective and was better than thepreviously used mix of sand and salt.

“It was helpful,” Hines said. “It helped us with a quicker thawing process once we got some warm enough temperatures. The other thing it did was it helped with our trucks from freezing up because the materials can sometimes freeze to the bed of the trucks.”

The county road department initially had 3,000 gallons of calcium chloride to use during the last week of January. Now 4,000 to 5,000 gallons are available.

“We had just finished our kind of one-time trial study with the stuff, and then we saw the forecasts that some more of this weather was coming in,” Hines said. “So we ended up getting some more and now we have plenty.”

Area, Pages 9 on 02/10/2010