Romeoville, Illinois struggles with surplus of road salt

ROMEOVILLE, Ill. (CBS) — Transportation crews were spread out around the Chicago area Wednesday evening, dropping salt to prevent slick areas ahead of the coming freezing rain and ice.

But in southwest suburban Romeoville, there was a rather unusual problem — too much salt to store.

Crews loaded up and out the gates and hit the road to combat the coming freezing rain by about 3 p.m. Tuesday. Before that, grounds foreman Scott Norman spent the afternoon filling up the Romeoville fleet with salt.

But while they’ll need plenty of salt for that purpose, they have a salt surplus because they are buying less each year — and the mild winters leave them with larger stockpiles.

Romeoville Public Works Director Chris Drey said the village has a huge stockpile — 2,000 tons of salt in one of their two domes.

“We have normally been able to dial our salt in pretty well from year to year,” said Drey. “This is just a perfect storm of everything.”

Drey said Romeoville has typically bought 4,000 to 5,000 tons of salt each year. But the past two winters, they have dialed back to 2,000 or less.

The new salt trucks in Romeoville have the technology to turn on and off the spreaders automatically. The village also uses more pre-treatment brine — which saves on salt along with the new spreaders.

But the mild winters are what have the biggest effect.

“Just everything it seems to have either gone north or south of us,” Drey said.

Drey said Romeoville is still under contract to pick up another 1,500 tons of salt from the State of Illinois, but the village currently does not have the space to store it. The village is thus exploring the idea of third-party storage.

“There is a monthly fee for that, so it was not to our advantage to do that,” Drey said.

Drey said the third-party storage was costly.

“I don’t remember the exact dollar amount, but it was definitely not worth our effort to do that at the time,” he said.

Instead, the Village of Romeoville will clear out space near the wastewater slurry, and wait as long as possible to pick up the rest of this season’s salt.

Drey said in the past municipalities would borrow or sell salt, but he thinks a lot of their neighbors are in the same situation.

Their crews were expected to be on the road dropping salt until about midnight.