The City of Rossland spent 42 per cent of its annual snow-clearing budget in January.
Darrin Albo, the manager of public works, said the city spent $173,000 of its $414,183 budget in January and is 12 per cent over the amount budgeted up to the end of January.
“That’s for plowing, sanding, snow removal — that’s for everything,” said Albo.
The reason for being over budget was the high snowfall in January.
“We were pounded pretty hard in January,” said Albo. “If you look at a graph of the past five years, which actually Bill Micklethwaite provided to us, we never really did have much of a break. Usually, we have a week-long break or four or five days where you can catch up and remove corners and other areas like that, but it just didn’t stop this year.”
The graph shows that the cumulative centimetres of snow in since Oct. 15, 2017, has been higher than in the previous five years since early November.
Albo said complaints were a little higher than normal this year.
“People were wondering is it because we have a new crew or anything like that, but by January most of our guys are very well adapted to the removal and like I say if you look at the accumulations that were received it speaks for itself,” said Albo.