As snow falls, Five Towns villages spending rise

Winter’s blast of snow and ice storms has Five Towns villages spending at increasing rates and making sure salt reserves don’t disappear.
In Cedarhurst, 60,000 has been earmarked for snow removal this winter. As of Wednesday’s storm, Mayor Andrew Parise said the village has spent $40,000 and are currently out of salt for de-icing town roads. “We will probably spend or possibly less depending on overtime,” Parise said. “You have to plow the streets and you can’t tell the people that you have no money. We are on the phone now, trying to get more salt here to us as soon as possible.”
Due to the amount of road cleaning municipalities have had to do because of the storms, there is now a salt shortage on Long Island.
Atlantic Beach Mayor Stephen Mahler said the village annually budgets $22,000 for snow removal. Mahler said Atlantic Beach is well within its budget this year. “We have a lot of surplus salt stockpiled,” Mahler said. “We have supplies. The snow is not a tremendous budgetary burden on us. We are financially solvent. We don’t believe in a lot of big salting anyway, and we stockpile our salt from what’s leftover from previous years.”
The Village of Lawrence has budgeted between $50,000 and $75,000 for the past three years for snow clean up. Mayor Martin Oliner said the village is in the process of calculating what has been spent so far this winter.

Hewlett Harbor Mayor Mark Weiss said that it doesn’t matter what a village budgets for snow removal. Hewlett Harbor has spent $21,000 so far this year in their snow removal budget, and has enough salt for snow removal as they stockpile it every year, Weiss said.
From the feedback Weiss has received from Hewlett Harbor residents, he understands they are satisfied with the village’s snow removal process, even if the amount spent to remove the snow and ice from village streets is more money compared to previous years.
“It’s taxpayer money that we’re spending,” Weiss said. “Taxpayers are very happy that they can count on being able to get out into the streets. In our village, we’ve learned not to play catch up with these storms. We can always stay on top of a storm, if not ahead of it.”