The Crested Butte News Serving the Gunnison Valley since 1999
Airport will also have to make adjustments
The county’s department of public works is digging its way out of a budget deficit for snow removal, even before the plowing season starts.
The financial shortfall won’t affect the county’s plowing operations, but it will cut into the amount of money available for maintenance on the plows, graders and loaders that are used to move the snow when it comes.
The Department of Public Works had a budget of $2.3 million for road repair, snow removal and maintenance for this calendar year. Of that money, just over $800,000 was slated for plowing, which turned out to be short of what was needed by the time the snow stopped this spring.
By the time the county’s trucks had shed their plows for the season, the bill for the year’s operations totaled more than $1 million. So for the remainder of the year, it will take a little budgetary manipulation to make ends meet.
“We’re already over budget for snow removal this year, so we’ll have to make cuts from some other area. We’re probably going to have to cut the amount of maintenance we can do this year,” says director of Public Works Marlene Crosby, adding that the “drop in the price of gas is going to help.”
And while Crosby works the numbers to keep the roads clear through the winter, her staff is working to put the plows on the roads, after heavy snow in the spring pushed their schedule back and caused some scheduling problems.
“We got such a late start on everyday road maintenance, so that put us a little behind on doing some of the stuff around the shop,” says Crosby.
For most of the year, county commuters aren’t relying on the Department of Public Works to get to where they need to go. The roads don’t become impassable with potholes and the bridges don’t disappear.
But when the snow starts to fly and the roads are covered over, the department’s 20 full-time plow drivers move from working in the wings to take center stage in clearing more than 250 miles of roads around the county.
The county’s roads—not including Highways 50 and 135, which are state roads—are split into five districts where plow drivers are stationed to start work as early as 3 a.m. to make sure the roads are clear for the first of the morning commuters.
“It usually takes about eight or 10 hours to plow a route for most of these guys, but they can go as long as 14 hours or more when it snows heavily. There are common sense driving limits that the drivers are pretty good about paying attention to,” says Crosby.
Although the Colorado Department of Transportation has been trying to limit the number of hours a driver can spend plowing in a day, Crosby says current restrictions don’t apply because the plows are considered emergency vehicles.
For a separate set of plow drivers in the county, a lot of restrictions do apply to when, where and how they do their job.
The snow removal crew at the Gunnison/Crested Butte Regional Airport has changed their plan to meet the guidelines laid out by the Federal Aviation Agency meant to maintain visibility on the airport’s runways.
“This year we’re doing it different after what we experienced last year. We ended up creating some height issue problems with the snow banks that piled up, so we modified our snow plan. We don’t want to create a problem in the future,” says airport manager John DeVore.
Along with a new snow plan, the airport is preparing for a lot of airplane traffic this season, with more flights and some larger planes scheduled to make regular stops.
To prepare their team of seven full-time and three part-time equipment operators—who are also the airport’s firefighters—the snow removal crew has had three full-day training sessions and an adjusted work week to maximize the number of employees working the airport on its busiest days.
“The way we worked it out was that Saturday is when we have everyone here, because there could potentially be as many as 1,000 passengers coming through the airport on that day,” says DeVore.
But it’s not just weekends that will be busy for the snow removal crew, which has a full-sized runway, eight connecting lanes, a taxiway, loading and unloading areas and parking lots to clear.
The only conditions that could stop flights from landing are excessively slick surfaces that don’t meet a certain friction requirement, low cloud cover and limited visibility.
“Big jets can land if there are three inches of snow or less on the runway and there are no temperature requirements, so unless they can’t see or stop, the flights will keep coming,” says DeVore.
