Last winter’s snow cost Chelsea close to $1 million more than the city had budgeted, and the city closed the gap the way it always does, out of free cash. In May the council approved $787,296 to cover the snow removal contract services deficit and $162,358 for salt. Snow overtime came to $158,343 and was funded in two pieces: $129,126 from the salary reserve, which it exhausted, and the remaining $29,217 from free cash. Counting that last piece, free cash paid $978,871 of the winter.
The budget line that is never enough
The FY27 budget the council passed in June puts $104,260 in the Snow and Ice Removal line: $25,000 for personnel and $76,260 for expenses. Last winter’s overrun was nine times that. This is deliberate. Massachusetts law is the only place a municipality may deliberately spend past its appropriation, on snow and ice, and cities budget the line low on purpose so the money is not tied up in a mild winter. The bill comes due in the spring from free cash or the next year’s revenue.
The practice works when free cash is deep. The City Manager’s own projection has free cash falling from $32.4 million to about $5 million this year, with snow named as one of the reasons. A winter costing the better part of $1 million against a $5 million cushion is a different proposition from the same winter against $32 million.
The snow melter
Councillor Recupero asked in March whether the city should buy a snow-melting machine, the kind Boston and the airport use to get rid of piled snow without trucking it. The administration’s answer, in the March 9 packet, priced a melter at about $900,000, with crew costs of roughly $25,000 a night when it runs. A melter does not reduce the plowing bill; it replaces the cost of hauling and dumping snow with the cost of burning fuel to turn it into water. For a city with no place to put snow, it may still pencil out. For a city whose snow problem last winter was $787,000 in contractor plowing, it is a different problem than the one that was expensive.
What to ask
Two questions belong in front of the council before the first storm. What did the FY26 snow appropriation start at, and does the administration budget it low on purpose. And whether the contractor plowing rate, which is the line that blew up, was rebid. We have put both to the Department of Public Works.