A number of cities in the upper Midwest have been faced with the problem of paying hefty prices to replenish their dwindling road salt supplies. Instead of following that trend, the city of Ames has decided to take a different route.

While the city of Ames has seen its fair share of winter weather, it has used alternative methods of dealing with the substantial amounts of freezing precipitation.

“The weather has created a situation where we have a low supply,” said Steve Salvo, operations administrator for Ames Public Works. “This isn’t something we aren’t able to deal with – what we’re doing is mixing what [road salt] we have with other chemicals and sand.”

While the mixture of salt with other substances has made for satisfactory driving and walking conditions throughout the season, Salvo said the city of Ames is just making do with this strategy.

“This is just a situation that all cities in Iowa are dealing with,” he said. “There are just other techniques we need to use; people need to be patient and be careful.”

The city of Ames has seen a steadily climbing cost for salt over the years. The per-ton cost the city has paid was $35.98 in 2005, $39.44 in 2006, $44.06 in 2007 and $47.56 in 2008. Salvo said the city uses nearly 100 tons of road salt in a winter with an average amount of snowfall.

“In a normal winter, you can see anywhere between 10 to 12 snowfalls – this year, we’ve already been out around 25 times,” he said.

According to the city of Ames budget for the 2006-2007 fiscal year, the cost of each inch of snow, per mile, is $82.24. In the 2005-06 fiscal year, the cost was just $63.06, while in the 2004-05 year it was $87.39.

Considering the highest accumulation in Ames over the last three fiscal years, 39 inches occurred in the 2005-2006 fiscal year, the price of removal per inch of accumulation per mile was significantly lower than in 04-05 and 06-07, when accumulation was 24.5 and 32 inches, respectively.

Compared to the 2004-2005 fiscal year, the 2005-2006 fiscal year saw the city of Ames increase its usage of liquid salt brine by nearly 5,000 gallons and sodium chloride by nearly 200 tons while reducing its usage of calcium chloride by nearly 1,000 gallons.

This trend didn’t continue during the 2006-2007 fiscal year, when sodium chloride usage steadied at 1,900 tons and calcium chloride usage increased to 4,000 gallons. The only item that was used less in the fiscal year was liquid salt brine, which dropped by 2,770 gallons from the previous year.

Salvo said 2008 has seen the city use a higher amount of calcium chloride. He said the amount of each type of road salt Ames keeps in supply depends on market price and availability.

“Right now it’s all about supply and demand, and demand only has certain amount of supply,” Salvo said. “It’s very difficult to get everything transported, and there’s really not much supply out there.”