HRM may exceed snow-clearing budget: Spokeperson

Halifax Regional Municipality says it may exceed it’s snow-clearing budget this year with two storms in February adding significant cost to the efforts.

Municipal spokesperson Tiffany Chase said many of the costs are fixed ahead of time, so there isn’t an exact number for how much was spent specifically on the blizzard and string of storms in early February.

But she told NEWS 95.7 those storms definitely were expensive just because of the huge amount of work it took to clean out from under all the snow.

“We had to spend extra money on overtime. We had our crews working around the clock for a period of 12 to 14 days and we brought in extra equipment as well that incurred additional costs for the winter operations budget,” said Chase.

So far, up to the end of last month, the HRM spent just shy of $17 million on winter operations.

The total budget is about $22.5 million and Chase said based on historical forecasts for March, it is expected this year will go slightly over budget.