Snow season is an expensive one for the city of Prince George.
In an interview with MyPGNow, Finance Director Kris Dalio and city spokesperson Mike Kellett said for five months of the year, the city spends between $50,000 and $150,000 a day on snow clearing operations.
“It can get as high as $150,000 a day, but I can imagine if the snow got even worse it’s possible to exceed that,” said Dalio.
Even when it doesn’t snow, PG is still paying a minimum of $50,000 a day in operational costs between November 1st and March 31st.
“Just because it’s not snowing doesn’t mean that crews aren’t working. A lot of mitigation work goes on,” said Kellett.
Some of that work includes depositing fractures rock, sand, and salt onto roads, sidewalks, and City-owned public areas, pushing back windrows along boulevards to increase snow storage capacity and replacing damaged culverts as necessary to alleviate flooding concerns during the spring thaw.
The current budget for snow removal in the city is $7 million dollars a year, however, Kellett said they’re looking to up that to $8.5 million.
Any leftover money from the budget goes into a reserve to cover ‘bad years’, a category that Dalio said last year falls under.
“We had about $2.5 million in the reserve at the start of 2018 and we definitely have gone over that $7 million dollar budget mark. By the time we have our year-end processes done we likely will have depleted that,” he said.
Prince George is currently under a snow storm warning, and may see as much as 30 centimetres fall between tomorrow and Friday.
For more information on Prince George’s snow clearing routes and priorities, you can follow this link.