This winter’s snow clearing program in Melita was running smoothly until some equipment breaks early in the new year.

Melita like other towns has been dealing with lots of snow to move this winter.

Mayor Bill Holden says once the equipment started breaking down they had to get creative to make sure streets were cleared.

“Our equipment was breaking and we had to hire rentals to come in and do a lot of our cleaning. It’s too bad because the unit that broke down was brand new machine and we’ve had nothing but trouble with it.”

The municipality’s snow clearing budget is just under $100,000 and Bill Holden says prior to the equipment breaks the town would have stayed on budget but now he anticipates their snow removal budget will be double what council had in the budget for 2022.

“We went a different route this year. We traded off our grader that was close to 20 years old. We also got rid of our 30 year old loader. We purchased a new, larger loader with a six way bucket to clear our streets. It was working great until it broke down” said Holden.

“There’s a couple of farmers we had come in, two local contractors and a contractor from Saskatchewan we have on standby to come in to do the streets and so far we’ve had him in once and I think he’ll be back this week again.”

Mayor Holden says the company they purchased the loader from is still trying to get it fixed. Meantime a replacement unit was sent to Melita and Bill Holden says it’s not always working which is quite frustrating.

Bill Holden hopes they can recover some some of the added snow removal costs from other sources or other parts of their budget.