Highway Dept Reviewed—

Council Panel Continues

Its Search For Savings

By John Voket

The Legislative Council’s Finance Committee met August 23 to continue its fact-finding toward making eventual recommendations about how the council might affect minimizing future property tax increases. This meeting, which was held at Edmond Town Hall, focused on the Public Works and Highway Departments, with First Selectman Pat Llodra and Public Works Director Fred Hurley in attendance.

The meeting began with Mr Hurley affirming that in the past 20 years his department has added two new positions while his staff has become responsible for the care and maintenance of 42 more miles of town roadways, as well as increasing their scope of facilities management.

One of the first issues to cover was the cost and process of local street sweeping and catch basin cleaning, which Mrs Llodra said is not only a service valued by the community, but mandated under state and federal environmental laws.

Mr Hurley explained that the town used to own two somewhat inefficient sweepers that required support by crews in dump trucks as well as a water wagon every time they would go out to clean local roadways.

“It tied up a lot of staff,” Mr Hurley said, adding that an eventual decision was made to get rid of the sweepers and contract out the service.

The town was able to achieve savings to that end for several years, spending between three and four cents per linear foot of sweeping after contracting with a regional family-owned company. At the same time, the town decided to acquire a sweeper with advanced technology and capacity that required just a single operator, replacing the five to seven people formerly required to do the same work.

About five years ago, the bid prices for sweeping jumped from seven to 14 cents per linear foot, and the town made the decision to use its own personnel working both during the day and on overtime during nights and weekends to complete the townwide project.

Mr Hurley said based on the inflated bid costs versus factoring highway crew overtime, the taxpayer cost to do the work was lower. But it did come with a price.

“Technically, it was cheaper, but we were burning out the staff,” he told the committee. “During that period we had more injuries and days lost when the town did it all.”

Last year, officials determined it would return to a system where a vendor would provide sweeping to about two-thirds of the town’s roadways, while the town’s sweeper would cover the rest during regular work hours. The vendor now charges ten cents per foot while the estimated town cost is about eight cents.

By the same token, if the town dropped the vendor completely, Mrs Llodra estimated it would take until October to for town crews exclusively to complete all sweeping and drain cleaning, versus the goal of having all sweeping done between July 4 and Labor Day, depending on the volume of sand on the roads.

She said the town’s road network and winter conditions in recent years have also demanded the use of a lot more sand than in neighboring towns, which adds time to the cleanup efforts. Mr Hurley said at the same time, environmental considerations have justified reducing the amount of sand while increasing the quantity of treated salt.

The town is now using about one-third the amount of sand that it was applying just a few years ago — and applying it in a one-to-one ratio with the treated salt. “We’ve reduced our sand use from about 18,000 cubic yards to between 4,000 to 6,000 yards,” Mr Hurley said.

Turning his attention to general public works projects, Mr Hurley said the town is becoming increasingly efficient and adept at balancing town crews with contractors on a wider variety of projects, including the water line job in its final stages in Sandy Hook.

At the same time, his department has maintained a balance of acquiring capital equipment with the Parks Department and school district, so the town has a complement of extremely durable, high quality rolling stock, with little or no redundancy among the three departments.

The first selectman cited the $50,000 spent for the Parks Department to acquire a medium-sized bulldozer, saying after reviewing how much the town paid to rent similar equipment over a three-year period, the town could have easily bought one it would have at its disposal whenever needed.

Mr Hurley said the town’s ability to produce future road work warnings published on the town website has been a great public service, while greatly reducing the number of related calls to the department’s switchboard.

Mrs Llodra also reminded the committee — Benjamin Spragg, Gary Davis, Kathryn Fetchick, and Dan Amaral — that the 20-year improvement plan for roads and bridges was only fully funded at $2 million per year for the first two years after it was initiated, and since then the town and Mr Hurley’s department have been in catch-up mode.

Mr Hurley concluded that as time progresses, the town’s use of technology — particularly its advanced use of satellite mapping tied to other project management practices — has saved taxpayers substantial costs, and that future technology acquisitions would increase that economic benefit, although the cost for such technology does not come cheap.

The committee agreed to meet again with the public works director and first selectman to further explore staffing-related costs, and how the strategic use of outside contractors might be used to minimize staff and benefit costs in the future. Mrs Llodra said the town is also looking at redefining how it dispatches road crews, possibly changing the current process to a sector-based system.

Ultimately, Mr Hurley said his crews are also pressed to respond, similarly to fire and emergency crews, when emergencies come up. And that impacts the speed at which the town can complete routine road and bridge maintenance or projects in process.