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VDOT battles wintry weather, depleted budget

Posted at 9:19 AM, Feb 25, 2014
and last updated 2014-02-25 09:53:26-05

RICHMOND, Va (WTVR) -- The chance for more winter weather and perhaps even another snow day for kids is heading our way. The Virginia Department of Transportation (VDOT) is entering the latest round of wintry weather. Unfortunately there is no more money left in the snow budget.

The agency said despite being stretched thin, it will not allow a drained budget to interfere with the pretreatment and snow removal process.

In the Richmond Metro area alone, VDOT was working with a $10.4 million snow removal budget for the year. Although we have not made it through the first two months of 2014, the estimated expenses have been depleted.

The millions of dollars the agency has set aside for the wintry conditions are used in a variety of ways to include: maintaining the departments salt and sand supply, deploying crew members to pre-treat roads and having workers on standby around the clock.

"This has been an incredibly active season," LeGrand said. "It looks like we have at least gone over our budget and we anticipate going over it by a couple of million dollars depending on the extremity of the weather coming up. We have continuously been restocking over the snow season, we will be ready to respond for Wednesday and this coming weekend."

The maintenance fund VDOT is now tapping into, is a budget of nearly $220 million.