Winter Mayhem: What's It Cost to Keep Your

There are thousands of miles of roads through Chattanooga and Hamilton county. When winter weather hits, things can get messy. January 2014 had three major winter weather events. January 4th, 14th, and 28th. For each, there was gridlock and dozens of crashes. "This was the perfect storm if you will. The temperatures were sub freezing, if you remember, in the 20's, " said Lee Norris, the Chattanooga Public Works Administrator, "and we did get a light dusting of precipitation, at the wrong time." As frustrations grew, hundreds of people and millions of tax dollars were hard at work. Norris runs the 600 person Public Works department. They're responsible for clearing all the city streets and some state roads in the city limits. "We just had a mess out there as far as traffic goes," said Norris. Norris specifically remembers January 28th. The wet stuff inched North around 8am. Schools and businesses released people at the same time. The roads were packed, public works trucks were behind. "We had not prepared for precipitation based on the weather forecast from all the sources we looked at," said Norris. For that weather event alone, which dropped about one inch of snow, public works went through more than 1700 tons of salt and sand each. The city spent about $290,000 dollars, roughly half of the weather budget for the year. "Stay home," said Norris, "It's the best thing people can do." The city is working on a total snow budget of about $650,000. Two of the three January storms accounted for 80% of that money. This year, the budget increased to about $100,000 because of a national salt shortage. "We're having to pay a little bit of a premium this year because it was not readily available," said Norris. For each pound of salt used, you pay 6 cents. That's only for the city salt, taxpayers also cover the cost for the county and state reserves. "This is approximately a 5000 ton bin," said Chris Smith a district supervisor with TDOT, talking about the salt storage building. The Tennessee Department of Transportation operates on a separate state budget of $20,000,000 million dollars. $4,000,000 of that money goes to Region 2. They cover 24 counties including Hamilton. This salt costs about four cents a pound. Whether it's city or state salt, it works the same when it hits the roads