The old Norse gods must be laughing. And the bones of woolly mammoths surely rest, chilled and peaceful, in the snow-covered earth. For the second year in a row, winter has hit with a vengeance, and Ridgefield is feeling it in the budget.
More than 51 inches of snow — about the height of the average six or seven year, according to the CDC — had fallen on the town this winter, according to a highway department tally sheet done last week, before last Tuesday’s storm.
Storm costs, by the highway department’s calculations, total about $738,000 — a figure that includes overtime but not the pay for plow drivers when they’re out on the roads during the regular weekday hours that they’d have been working anyway. Some $496,000 of that was spent on 5,647 tons of Ice B’ Gone road treatment product.
Controller Kevin Redmond, in a slightly different exercise, produced a five-year tracking of snow costs for the selectmen to consider Tuesday night in their budget deliberations. He used a year-to-date total of $624,000 for the gross cost of snowstorm expenses so far this budget year.
The high spending mark over the last five years was 2013-14, at $887,686, according to Mr. Redmond’s figures, and the low was $309,454 in 2011-12.
The five-year average was $593,793.
With spring in sight, First Selectman Rudy Marconi is expecting more.
“There’s no doubt, at the end of the year we’ll be $850, maybe $950,” he said Tuesday night — verbal shorthand for $850,000 or $950,000. The National Weather Service predicts snow is possible Friday and Saturday.
Budget adjustments will have to be made — as happened with last year’s tough winter.
“Last year we were about $200,000 over, and I’m anticipating a similar situation this year,” Mr. Marconi said recently.
Figures from Ken Sandberg at the highway department show that at the start of this week the town crew had racked up more than 238 hours of overtime, at a cost of over $176,000.
Private plowing contractors who are called in to assist with bigger storms have cost an additional $65,100 so far this year.
But Mr. Marconi expects the budget will be balanced come the end of the fiscal year, in June.
“At the end of the year, we’d satisfy it,” he said.
This will require some spending in other areas to be limited, or frozen, so there are accounts that come in below budget, allowing money to be transferred out of them to cover the winter accounts.
“To begin identifying areas, you can’t wait to the end of the year. We have to begin identifying and freezing some accounts,” Mr. Marconi said.
“Bad word, I know, at this point,” he said, after using “freezing.”
And winter isn’t over — yet.