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Winter is coming ... Not to worry, Oxford has salt

By Audrey Davis, For The Miami Student

With winter around the corner, the Oxford City Council has already made important decisions in preparation. Each year, the city budgets $85,950 to pay for salt on the roads and other road maintenance materials.

The city council consults with Mike Dreisbach, director of public services, to decide how much money will be spent.

"Mike has been around for a while," said Kevin McKeehan, the mayor of Oxford. "We pretty much just rely on what he says."

Dreisbach said there is no such thing as a normal winter - it varies so much from year to year. Because of that, it is almost impossible to predict how much salt will be used.

"We have a storage building that holds a little over 1,000 tons of salt, which is completely full at the beginning of the season that we may add to later if needed," said Dreisbach.

The service department tries to save salt from year to year, so they always have extra on hand. To McKeehan's knowledge, the town has never completely run out of salt, but it has gotten close.

To determine how much money should be allocated for salt each year, Dreisbach said Oxford's service department does a cooperative purchasing contract in partnership with the Butler County Engineer's office. Several government agencies come together to find the best possible price. Dreisbach then proposes that number to the council and they vote.

"Should we have a winter with an extraordinary number of snow events, the city council has also passed supplemental budgets in the past to allow for extra spending," Dreisbach said.

As long as McKeehan has been around he said that they have always approved the proposed salt budget.

The money for salt purchases comes from a general fund - a variety of sources including property tax and income tax. All of the money allocated to the service department for street maintenance comes from this fund.

Last winter, sophomore Kaicey Weber said there were a few times that the driving conditions on campus seemed unsafe.

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"I found that many of the side roads by the dorms were awful and were almost too bad to drive on," Weber said. "It took many hours until they were cleared or salted."

In the case of an extremely bad winter, salt use has to be regulated, so when it has come close to running out in the past, they have resorted to only salting the hills and intersections.

"The weather is virtually impossible to predict," McKeehan said. "You can never know what type of weather the winter will bring."

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