Snow removal blows holes in Long Island town budgets

Relentless winter weather, a pattern of long-lasting weekend storms and frigid temperatures are pushing Long Island town snow budgets to their limits.

Several towns, including Brookhaven, East Hampton and Southold, have already surpassed their spending allocations for rock salt, sand and other snow fighting costs for 2026 — and there’s still six weeks until spring.

Those towns have dipped into reserves to keep their funds for storm expenses healthy, officials told Newsday.

On Tuesday, town boards in East Hampton and Southold signed off on more money for snow removal.

The Town of Brookhaven has exceeded its snow budget by about $2 million — spending about $5.4 million since Jan. 1, officials said. The town tapped its snow reserve fund to pay for the latest salt shipments, according to Highway Superintendent Dan Losquadro.

Brookhaven has spent $3.2 million on salt purchases, about $800,000 on overtime and $1.4 million to hire vendors to plow snow, officials said. That is not unexpected for a snow year that has been "far above our normal," he said in an interview.

"We can get very mild winters ... and we can get years like this where you get that polar air and you have the Great South Bay freeze over," Losquadro said. 

So far this winter, Long Island MacArthur Airport has recorded 28.6 inches of snowfall, Bryan Ramsey, a meteorologist at the National Weather Service's Upton bureau, said Wednesday. Last year, 10.6 inches of snowfall had accumulated at MacArthur through the same period.

Fresh funding

Stephen Lynch, East Hampton Town's highway superintendent, said workers have used about 1,200 tons of sand and salt over the past few weeks. The department has about 1,000 tons left and will receive more shipments soon, he said.

On Tuesday, the East Hampton Town Board approved moving $210,000 from reserves to restore depleted funds for snow contractors, as well as for salt and sand purchases. The town budgeted $65,000 for snow removal contractors and $195,000 for snow removal supplies this year, according to Town Administrator Becky Hansen.

Southold surpassed its $185,000 budget for salt and sand, according to Highway Superintendent Dan Goodwin.

Also Tuesday, Southold's town board approved tapping $80,000 in surplus funds from prior, more mild winters to cover an additional $50,000 in rock salt and $30,000 in sand.

"That’ll refill our barn and keep us in a really good position for the foreseeable future," Goodwin said in an interview. "It’s not an option to not treat the roads. These are the materials we need to do the job."

Goodwin said the most recent storm, on Feb. 7, was particularly challenging. Though most of Long Island got 1 to 3 inches of snow, about 5 inches accumulated in Southold. Fierce 50-mph winds created whiteout conditions and deep snowdrifts, some over 6 feet.

The department spent between $20,000 and $25,000 in materials to treat the roads for that one storm alone, Goodwin said.

The Village of Brightwaters has already spent nearly double its $17,000 snow budget this year, Mayor John Valdini said. Staff overtime has accounted for about $17,000 of that total.

That overrun is because many of the storms fell on weekends, when employees are paid more than their normal rates, Valdini said. The village will have to pull from its reserves to cover the extra cost, the mayor told Newsday.

The towns of North Hempstead, Oyster Bay, Babylon, Islip, Southampton and Riverhead have yet to exhaust their snow budgets, officials there said. But the recent storms have brought challenges, officials said.

Snowdrifts

Snowdrifts from last weekend’s storm quickly covered roads near open farm fields in Riverhead. Mike Zaleski, Riverhead’s highway superintendent, said there were about 50 stuck and stranded motorists across town during that storm.

"It does not matter the accumulation. One inch of snow, we still would have had drifting problems. The wind is the enemy," Zaleski said.

Despite an active winter, Zaleski said Riverhead is within its budget with comfortable supplies of salt and sand. Riverhead allocated $275,000 for salt and has spent $136,000 so far, according to Jeanette DiPaola, the town's financial administrator. Riverhead budgeted $75,000 for overtime; the expenses for overtime were not immediately available, DiPaola said.

Zaleski said he tries to budget for the worst-case scenario.

"We’ve had some light winters, but this is obviously the start of a bad winter. I say that because it’s only Feb. 10," he said Tuesday, adding: "I don’t want to see it snow again."

Southampton Town Highway Superintendent Charlie McArdle lamented the costs of overtime due to the recent storm.

"For some reason, it doesn't snow Monday through Friday, 8 to 4," he said.

Some people refused to stay off the roads during the storms, McArdle said. That's caused a few minor accidents, including a rear-end into a plow truck that took down a salt spreader machine, he said.

Goodwin said the long duration of recent storms "takes a toll on everybody," requiring extra labor and materials to keep pace.

A preliminary report showed Southold’s road crew in January logged more than 2,200 hours of "comp time," Goodwin said. Comp time can either be paid as overtime or used as time off later in the year.

"We literally started at midnight on New Year’s Day fighting snow," he said. "It’s been a crazy winter."

Newsday's Denise M. Bonilla, Sam Kmack, Carl MacGowan, Joshua Needelman and Joseph Ostapiuk contributed to this story.