This winter hasn't delivered the kind of strenuous shoveling workout most Northland residents have come to expect.
Duluth has received only about 46 inches of snow to date this winter - about 30 inches less than normal. But that doesn't mean the city is exactly flush with savings from unneeded snow-removal services, said Kelly Fleissner, Duluth's maintenance operations manager.
Unless more winter weather is unleashed, Duluth will exit the season with about $35,000 left in its overtime budget for road maintenance operations and about $350,000 of reserves in its salt and sand budget. Those funds are supposed to carry the city through the rest of this calendar year.
"It doesn't give us a lot of wiggle room," Fleissner said. "The last couple of years, November and December have been numbers right around the $350,000 mark.So what we have left is probably the right amount. It would be a bit risky to take money from that and try to reallocate it.
St. Louis County reports no windfall from the mild winter either.
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Jim Foldesi, the county's director of public works, explained that regardless of snowfall totals, certain fixed costs, such as equipment maintenance, bulk purchases of sand and salt, and the regular employment of county maintenance workers don't go away.
Nevertheless, he said county staff spent less time behind plow wheels this winter, allowing workers to tend to other duties.
"We were able to catch up on tons of maintenance activities," he said, explaining that staff has been able to clear right-of-ways of encroaching brush and trees, tend to problem culverts and tackle other tasks as well.
"We've got more than 2,000 miles of county road, and a lot of that is gravel," he said. "We were able to regravel a bunch of those this winter."
Even though the inch-count for snow this winter was low, that doesn't necessarily correlate with the amount of roadwork that was required.
"It doesn't take much sometimes to make our hills pretty slippery, and we're required to go out and treat the streets, even though you may not need to do a lot of shoveling in your driveway at home," Fleissner said.
The quantity of snow a storm drops is often of less importance than other factors, Fleissner said.
"The difference between an 8-inch snowfall and a 1- or 2-inch snowfall and the amount of product you use isn't huge, assuming the event durations aren't grossly different," he explained.
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Foldesi agreed that snowfall totals in the Duluth area were somewhat deceiving.
"There was less snow, yes, but we had a lot of smaller events, and we still had to go out and put down materials," he said.
Fleissner concurred, saying: "It's probably more about the number of events that force us to mobilize and deal with slippery road conditions. And that probably wasn't nearly as different as the amount of snowfalls between the two winters."
Still, this winter has offered a welcome respite from the previous one, which dumped more than 140 inches of snow on Duluth.
Last winter, Duluth spent about $940,000 on sand and salt - nearly 28 percent more than the $735,000 the city has dropped on the same materials so far this winter.
Overtime savings have been even more substantial. While city road workers logged about $170,000 in overtime last winter, they worked less than half that much this winter, earning a more modest $66,000 of overtime pay.
