ALBANY COUNTY — A harsh winter was punishing for local roads. As town and village crews work now to repair the damage, most highway superintendents are pleased with the more than $211,000 Albany County is receiving in funds to help pay for winter harm.

Additionally, the 2015-16 state budget includes over $2.3 million for the county from the Consolidated Local Street and Highway Improvement Program known as CHIPs.

The town of Guilderland got $284,351 in CHIPs funds with an additional $39,899 in “extreme winter recovery apportionments.”

Steve Oliver, Guilderland’s highway superintendent, termed the added funds “awesome.”

“I’m so happy to get $39,000 that I just keep looking at it,” he said last week. “It’s huge.”

Oliver also said, “We could not pave half of the roads we need to without CHIPs. It’s mainly used for paving and resurfacing, mostly in the outlying areas away from the city.”

Guilderland’s eastern border abuts the city of Albany.

“Where there is clay, we get a lot of frost heaves,” said Oliver. “Down closer to the city, in the sandier areas, it drains better and isn’t affected as much by the weather.”

Altamont, a mile-square village within the town of Guilderland, is getting $21,813 in CHIPs funding with another $2,803 for extreme winter recovery.

“I think it’s great,” said Jeffrey Moller, head of Altamont’s Public Works.

Moller said the CHIPs funding is “about the same” as usual, based on the amount of roads the village owns and maintains. He added, “But we don’t usually get the amount for extreme winter recovery.”

He said the CHIPs funds are usually used to “slurry-seal the streets, according to our schedule. We try to do it every seven years or so.”

New Scotland

The 2015-16 CHIPs allotment for New Scotland is up about $25 from this year — to $184,114, which is normal, according to Kenneth Guyer, the town’s highway superintendent.

The winter allotment, of $27,371, however, was a surprise.

“Last year was the first year for a winter recovery bonus,” Guyer said, surmising it would be a one-time payment; next year’s is up over $5,000 from this year’s.

“When we did our budgeting, that was not taken into consideration,” Guyer said of the winter recovery funds. He said he “absolutely” wants to use the money to pave roads, for which he will need town board approval. He said he’ll use every dollar he can get for repair and resurfacing.

“With the money I budgeted and the CHIPs money, with the bonus,” Guyer said he would be “able to pave about four or five miles of road.” The extra $27,000 will pave “probably not a half a mile,” he said.

New Scotland bids cooperatively with Albany County for asphalt, he said; the cost has gone up a few dollars per ton over last year. “So, with a little bit more money,” he said, “we’re probably going to be in the same boat as far as what we can do.”

Guyer said he gets a lot of calls from residents asking when their roads will be paved. “I’d love to get to everybody’s road,” he said. “We have to attend to what road needs it the most.”

For about seven years, New Scotland has had a shared services agreement with the neighboring town of Bethlehem, Guyer said. “They own a paver. Bethlehem will bring their paver to us,” he said.

For paving, New Scotland hauls blacktop in its own trucks, and supplies those trucks and labor to help with Bethlehem projects, Guyer said. “It allows us to stretch our budget and put down more pavement,” he said. “It definitely works out for both towns.”

Voorheesville, a two-square-mile village in New Scotland, is getting  $54,642 in 2015-16 apportionments with $7,459 more for extreme winter recovery.

The base amount that Voorheesville received last year was $54,609, according to Clerk-treasurer Linda Pasquali. “That stays pretty steady,” she said. She quoted a figure from two years ago of $54,603.

The supplement for extreme winter recovery last year was $5,967, she said, so this year's supplement is about $1,500 more than last year.

"Our paving budget is about $130,000,” Pasquali said, “so this certainly helps with that. And I’m sure the extra will go to any repair from the weather. I’m sure we have more potholes than we did last year."

Hilltowns

Berne is expected to get an apportionment of $183,532 in regular CHIPs funding, along with $27,738 in winter recovery money.

“Pretty much every dirt road has been muddy or potholes,” said Randy Bashwinger, who just came through his first winter as Berne’s highway superintendent. “I mean, they’re all over.” In recent weeks, his crew has been patching potholes, given extra time as inmates from Albany County’s jail have been called out to do other jobs, like clearing brush from ditches and at the senior center.

Bashwinger said the town used about the same amount of salt as last year, but the number of people working on the roads was up from five full-time workers last year to six this year with seven part-time workers. In the middle of March, he had part-time workers come to help reduce the time it takes to make roads drivable again.

In Westerlo, the highway department’s budget is supposed to be helped by $120,763 in regular CHIPs funds and $17,583 for winter recovery.

Keith Wright in Westerlo said the numbers were somewhat lower than he expected and he will use the extra money to continue patching roads that heaved over the winter.

“After the winter we had, I was hoping. I didn’t know what to expect the way they were talking down there,” said Wright of Albany.

He declined to say which of the town’s roads needed the most attention, concerned about stoking residents’ expectations.

“Even when I do know, I’m not going to put them out until I’m started on them and I’m done,” Wright said. He added that he would like to have at least two road projects completed this year, but he hasn’t decided whether to use oil and stone or to moto-pave, using a more flexible and porous surface.

Westerlo’s supervisor, Richard Rapp, said he expects the town board will review Wright’s list of road projects at its May meeting and that it would be publicly available. The department never gets to all the projects on a list in a given season, Rapp said.

In Rensselaerville, highway Superintendent Randall Bates said with the extra $27,327 the town will be able to do additional resurfacing this season.

“We could probably resurface two-inch overlay, about a half-mile of road, 20-foot road — and that’s big deal for us,” Bates said last week, before materials bids were opened and before he submitted his list of projects.

The year before, Bates said, the town got $23,000 in “winter recovery” money.

“This year, I didn’t see it coming,” he said. “I didn’t know there would be any winter recovery so, when I saw that, I was very glad.”

He likened it to a reimbursement for work already done or being done on the town’s roads, adding stone, road base repairs, fixing broken culverts and pipes. The northern end of Pond Hill Road had damage that Bates didn’t expect, he said, which he plans to fix with hot-mix asphalt.

Bates, now in his mid-60s, spent most of his career working for the state’s Department of Transportation and said this past winter may have been the toughest in his career.

“I’m not sure which is worse, the beginning of the winter where we had the cold in late November and early December and then we had three cycles of frost and thawing until the last one was Jan. 19, and that was just the turning point,” Bates said. “And, from that, we had heavy rains, we had flooding, an ice storm, all in the course of the same day, and then immediately it was cold and we had 90 days of really dramatic cold weather, which caused everything to freeze again.”

Much of the nuisance was the constant, short snowstorms that require as much time and labor as larger ones, he said.

The slow thaw and snowmelt that came after, though, was favorable for the roads, Bates added.

Knox superintendent Gary Salisbury could not be reached for comment.

Anne Hayden Harwood reported on Guilderland, Jo E. Prout on New Scotland, Elizabeth Floyd Mair on the villages, and Marcello Iaia on the Hilltowns.