Cleaning up after snowfalls this winter has cleaned out the money in Orillia's snow removal budget.
The city is now operating in the red because it only had $1.398 million for all of 2017 in the budget for snow removal.
“The whole budget is about $1.4 million a year,” says Mayor Steve Clarke. “Sometimes we use it all up and sometimes there's some left over.”
The city's annual snowfall generally comes in at around 275 centimeters – that's about nine feet. This year they've been pounded with 14 feet of snow.
“I think it sucks because some days I can't get out… I’m housebound. I have to stay in,” says resident Elaine McGrath.
Last week's warmer than normal temperatures and rain melted huge amounts of snow, forcing the city to bring in help to clean it up.
“To accommodate that runoff, we had to bring in 30 dump trucks from an external contractor to remove almost 600 trucks loads of snow a night to clear the catch basins because if we didn't we may have had massive flooding when the weather turned warm,” Clarke says.
Environment Canada says higher rainfall numbers have added to the problem in Orillia.
“They've had maybe and half times the amount of rain in January/February,” says Dave Phillips, senior climatologist with Environment Canada. “They've had twice the number of freeze thaw days.”
“In the Barrie-Orillia area we typically get about 20 per cent of our annual snowfall occurs after the first of March, about 50 centimeters worth.”
So Phillips says people should expect more snow before spring.
