An unprecedented snowfall at the end of November and recent warm weather has resulted in the Town of Banff needing up to an extra $165,000 for snow removal throughout the resort community.
Banff council approved the extra money, but it completely emptied the municipality’s snow reserve of $36,000, used up a small predicted surplus of $60,000 for 2014 and will result in a deficit for the year that will be funded out of the budget stabilization reserve.
Councillor Chip Olver said while removal of the snow, especially in side streets, is absolutely necessary as a result of the amount of snow that fell early in the season, she is concerned there needs to more discussion on how that account is funded into the future, especially when considering the changing climate.
“We have to do this, it is an unusual snowfall that we are not used to having, but we need to have a conversation as council about our snow reserve,” she said. “I believe our snow reserve is not large enough for what we can expect to see with a changing climate.”
Council voted to support a motion to bring the issue back to the finance committee in 2015.
Operations manager Paul Godfrey said the 60 centimetres of snow that fell on Nov. 27-28 was significant and the streets department has been actively plowing, grading and hauling snow away since. But the depth of the snow, coupled with the dramatic fluctuation in temperature from -30 C to 5 C recently, has exacerbated the situation – deep frozen ruts have been transformed into slushy, sloppy driving conditions.
The funds needed were for overtime for streets staff and contracted services to bring in an extra four to eight trucks.
“When you are trying to plow snow on the road by just pushing it on the median or pushing it on the side of the road, we ran out of that capacity,” Godfrey said, adding normally snow amounts are small enough to store on sides or medians of roads.
“Our immediate concern was storage, but now we are worried about slush and stormwater ponding. But we also have -10 C to -12 C (temperatures) coming up so we are trying to get it broken down.”
On Tuesday (Dec. 9), crews were already completing plowing and snow removal of the red zone, the highest priority for snow removal in the downtown core, and will continue through the week with blue, green and yellow priority zones as set out in the Town’s snow and ice removal policy.
Estimates are based on 10-hour shifts during the week and some removal on the weekend.
