True cost of winter storm locally won’t be known for week or two

About the only remainder of this past week’s storm Monday was the scattered heaps of dirty ice that had been piled up where lots were cleared, but it will be weeks before the full impact can be known.

The area escaped icing from freezing rain but some record low temperatures plus about five inches of snow and sleet still essentially paralyzed the community.

“We were very fortunate that it was mostly snowfall and ice did not form on limbs,” Mayor Tim Kent said. “We were worried about it bringing down trees and lines.”

Kent referred to the 1994 ice storm in which ice not only caused utility lines to fall, but actually broke poles.

“We want people to know they are going to receive some high utility bills next month,” he said, because of the record low temperatures.

He noted that keeping the thermostat set low could not guarantee a low bill, because furnaces still had to run more than usual even to keep up with lower temperatures.

Light, gas and water manager Bill Mattox said they won’t know how much higher than usual natural gas and electricity usage was during the storm until the end of the month. That’s because TVA only provides billing once a month. The same is true for the natural gas coming from the Tennessee Gas line.

Mattox and the mayor both said the LG&W Department will work with customers who do have bills much higher than usual, however.

Most area business owners lost about five days’ revenue due to the storm. For small businesses in particular, this could be significant.

That also means the city lost those five days’ retail sales and tourism tax. Based on totals for 2020, that means about $19,000 lost in retail sales tax and $4,600 in tourism tax. While that might not hurt the city budget severely, it extrapolates to about $1.5 million in lost retail sales for merchants and $233,000 in sales that would have been added to food and lodging totals with the two-percent tourism tax.

The main weather-related city expense was overtime for street department employees.

Mayor Tim Kent said the street workers were clearing streets and lots all day and well into the night throughout the week. This was mostly accomplished using the city’s motor grader and front-end loader, with two trucks operating salt spreaders.

He said they found out the de-icer did not work well on snow or sleet, only on bare ice.

As city and county officials have both said, workers have been doing the best they could with the equipment at their disposal. However, it does not make economic sense to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on snow-related equipment that might only be used once a decade.

Garbage collection was more or less up to normal Monday, although the county added crews to aid in picking up the excess.

The process takes time because each garbage truck, when full, has to drive to the Three Rivers Regional Landfill outside Pontotoc to empty its load before returning to pick up more. City trucks were having to make at least two trips each day and wait in line to dump their contents before returning.

The New Albany landfill is only certified for rubbish such as yard trimmings but not garbage such as food items.

Schools were mixing some in-person and virtual classes but several roads in the county school district were reported to still be unsafe for buses Tuesday, meaning parents would have to drive their children to school on their own.