DPW Chief: Snow Has Taken Toll on OT

Adam Jacobs says the town Department of Public Works is in pretty good shape as far as its available supply of sand and salt to treat town roads following this winter's first two big snow storms.

The operations manager for the Merrimack DPW highway division said the town's Public Works employees have once again demonstrated the mettle needed to take whatever Mother Nature can dish out.

As soon as the snow begins, all of them typically settle in and get ready to work as many as 48 to 72 hours straight to get the job done, he said, and the resulting overtime piles up just as much as the snow.

"When the storms start on a Friday afternoon and last through a weekend, that is very expensive," said Jacobs, who has worked for the town for four years.

He said the Polar Vortex that sent temperatures plummeting to the single digits and below zero following the nearly one foot of snow the town received last week also required several road treatments.

Richard Seymour, the town's Public Works director, said "we have expended 75 percent of our regular overtime budget, or 75 percent of the total budget of $63,000."

The highway division's budget is $4.5 million of the total town's Public Works Department budget. Jacobs said that if the town experiences another three- to four-day snow storm accompanied by freezing temperatures, the overtime budget and the division's resources would begin to feel the strain.

The division's fleet of snow plows and pick up trucks equipped with snow plows are responsible to clear 180 miles of town roads and treat those roads when sub-freezing temperatures will not allow the road salt to reach the pavement.

In addition to overtime, Jacobs said it costs money to keep those snow plow vehicles running. 

"If you want to go a step further and factor in vehicle fuel, repair and replacement of equipment, and the necessary street sweeping to remove all that winter sand, the 'cost' of winter goes up to $660,000 per year, based on our estimates," Jacobs wrote in an e-mail.

Each year, the highway division has to hold its collective breath and hope it will not exhaust his overtime budget, Jacobs said. Whenever that does happen because of too many weather events, Jacobs said it forces the Public Works Department to transfer funds from other areas in the budget or spend less on capital expenditures.

With 10 weeks of real winter left to go, Jacobs said no one can say for sure how much more overtime will be needed to get the job done.