Heavy winter could affect summer road work plans

PONDERAY - This season's heavy winter is expected to take a bite out of summer road maintenance plans, state and local transportation officials said on Friday.

“You'll probably see very little asphalt go down this year,” Chuck Spickelmire, Bonner County's Road & Bridge supervisor, said during a transportation forum hosted by the Greater Sandpoint Chamber of Commerce.

With winter-related elements of the budget approaching exhaustion or completely depleted, Spickelmire said the only place he can turn to for relief is the money set aside for summer projects.

The series of winter storms that caked the area with snow earlier this year kept plow crews working overtime, depleted anti-skid and de-icing agents, and hammered equipment, road officials said.

“There were 21 straight days where our plows did not shut off,” said Ken Sorenson, an Idaho Transportation Department construction official for the Panhandle.

Sorenson said the fuel bill for ITD plow equipment in January alone approached a quarter-million dollars. He plans to meet with colleagues in Boise later this month to see where additional funding can be teased out of the budget. Sorenson said any additional funding would likely result in a summer project getting pulled somewhere in Idaho.

However, Sorenson said ITD still hopes to resurface 19 miles of state Highway 57, from Priest River to Lamb Creek. Work is also expected to wrap up ahead of schedule on the Thompson Park Bridge replacement project west of Clark Fork.

Assistant ITD Director Scott Stokes is in Washington, D.C., in an effort to find federal money to replace the Dover Bridge, Sorenson added. The Dover Bridge project is designed but is bereft of construction funding.

Kody Van Dyk, the city of Sandpoint's Public Works director, said the city's snow-removal budget is running about two times more than planned.

“It was a significant year for us,” said Van Dyk.