The snow is gone and spring officially arrives on Friday, but Orland Park is already looking ahead to next winter.
Village Manager Paul Grimes said Orland Park is in the unusual position of ending the winter with a full barn of road salt and will be asking for much less salt through the state’s joint purchasing program this year. Trustees voted at Monday night’s village board meeting to request bids for 4,500 tons of salt, down from the 6,600 tons this year.
“The good news is it’s full at a very favorable price,” Trustee Ed Schussler said. “I expect it will be much higher next year.”
After an unusually snowy 2013-2014 winter, some towns paid much steeper prices for road salt this winter. Towns such as Plainfield and Shorewood paid $100 per ton or more, while Orland Park, in the second year of a two-year contract signed before supplies grew tight, paid just $53.84 per ton.
This year’s snowfall — much of which arrived during the Super Bowl Sunday blizzard that dumped 19 inches on the Chicago area over about 36 hours on Feb. 1 and 2 — taxed towns in other ways.
Village spokesman Joe La Margo said plow crews drove more than 7,500 miles and worked more than 560 hours of overtime to keep streets clear that weekend. The village also spent about $22,700 on a contractor that helped them plow streets during the storm.
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Also Monday, the board’s Public Safety Committee voted prior to the board meeting to recommend that the village board spend $13,000 to upgrade Orland Park’s tornado siren system. The current system relies partially on a 10-year-old computer with an “outdated/unsupported operating system,” according to documents provided to trustees.
Deputy Police Chief Thomas Kenealy said that computer lost power Monday, though police fixed the problem in about an hour. One of the computers also failed about two years ago, but police found an older computer to replace it the same evening, Kenealy said.
If either computer controlling the village’s 13 tornado sirens fails, Orland Park could still activate sirens by calling the company that manages the siren system, but Kenealy said police want to have an easier and faster back-up option in place.
If approved by the full board, the village would replace the outdated computer with a new one and install a button on each computer to independently sound the village’s tornado sirens, one at the police station at 15100 Ravinia Ave., and another at the Emergency Operations Center, 14600 Ravinia Ave.
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