 Welcome to Sheboygan County government working for you. My name's Adam Payne, Sheboygan County administrator and co-host of this program. Although, as you can see, my partner's not with me today. Chairman Mike Van Der Steen actually had his second surgery on his second ankle recovering at home. And as I think I mentioned last month, if you get a chance to give Mike a call, please do. I'm sure you'd appreciate that, spending a number of weeks, in fact, recovering from some pretty serious ankle surgery, both feet, but I can tell you, it's still very engaged with the county and spending far more time on email and internet and texting than I care for, Greg. It's always checking in. But no, we miss Mike and we wish him well and certainly we wish all of you a Merry Christmas and happy holidays. Thanks for joining us today. Like every month, we're pleased to have one of our department heads with us and this month it's Greg Schnell, our Highway Commissioner. Welcome, Greg. Thanks for having me, Adam. Greg does an excellent job as our Highway Commissioner and as you know, tis the season when folks are gonna get out there and start dealing with some conditions that they haven't experienced for a number of months. And Greg, as you know, it's a busy time of the year for your staff as they gear up for the winter season. And why don't we start there? Please share a little bit with our viewers about what are the seasons of the Highway Department. Well, let's start with winter, I guess. Winter, it takes us a while to prepare for that and some of that preparation starts way back in May already when we take our final inventories of the prior winter and that inventory is salt. That's one of the largest expenses that we have with our winter. And so we take a look at what we have left over and we evaluate what we think we're gonna need for the future and that's based on a five-year average. And then we give those numbers to the DOT and the DOT goes on a statewide bid in order to give us the best bang for our buck. That's just the salt end of it. We also check our blades that are required on our plows, tires, chains, you name it, that takes to move snow. We have to have all that stuff prepared as well as hanging snow fence so we can protect some of our roads from the severe drifting as well as just making sure that we have the proper staff to take care of what we need to take care of. And at any given time, I mean, if we get hit with a real harsh snowstorm, how many trucks, how many units can you have out on the roads? Our initial attack is gonna be 42 trucks that takes care of state, county and town. County and town are taking care of a lot of times at the same time. And then if it develops into something bigger we can bring in our graders, which we have 12 of and we also have eight Oshkosh trucks that if we have to get bigger. We have also three snow blowers that hook up to front end loaders that open up the big stuff if we need to. So our viewers might be thinking, well 42 trucks coming out to plow, how long can that take? But my bet is what they don't have a feel for is just how many lane miles your crews are dealing with out there. Put that in perspective. We take care, we have 450 county trunk miles. Plus we take care of 465 miles of town roads and we have 260 some miles of state roads. So about 2200 miles, lane miles all together that we have to take care of and maintain throughout the storm. Well we'll come back to winter in a minute. So that's one key season. What are other primary seasons that the highway department gears up for? We only have two in the highway department and that's summer, the other one is summer. So summer and winter is what we deal with and as we're all well aware of in the last couple of years there's been a tremendous amount of influence and construction work that's been happening on our state highways as well as our county highways. And it's kind of strange to me and I shouldn't say strange, but it's new that our construction season is starting to gain length. We all witnessed it this year with the I-43 bridges being replaced at Owen and Jay. Those projects started at the end of February already which is still considered to be winter and that years ago hasn't happened. So now we're extending our construction season. So really there is no in-between anymore. They're all running together. And set the stage as well with your staff. How large is your department? Tell me, employees do you have approximately what's your annual operating budget? We have 90 employees including myself. Our annual operating budget is about $15 million. I don't have $15 million, we have what our staff takes care of is we have our own asphalt plan, crushing operation. We have a full construction crew, base patching, paving. You name it, we can do it. We're pretty much a one source operation. We have our own pits. So we're a self-contained construction company. So during the construction season, of course, everyone has their respective roles and responsibilities. Then when it turns to the winter, is everybody getting behind a plow or how does that work? How does that transition happen? The transition is that all of our operators work in the summer, also work in the winter. So they just come from either their dozer and they're utilized on a grader or a truck for plowing snow as well. We have, I shouldn't say extra employees, but when you get to the bigger storms, when you still need everything, we may be a few guys short if we had to run all the Oshkosh trucks. But in the past quite a few years, those trucks have been very limited use and we hope we don't have to bring them out. So it's not a bad place to keep them in the shed as well, but it is also our insurance policy for the bigger snows. And of course, everyone's been trying to conserve energy. In fact, you may have just noticed that the light's just brightened here on the set. And that's because we're all very conscious about saving tax dollars and making sure that we use them wisely. I know I hope that, I hope folks didn't notice that too much. I imagine it probably feels like a sunny day here right now. I'm almost getting kind of warm. Well, construction season, winter season, you talked a little bit about the transition. You talked about how staff are allocated. Let's go back to winter a little bit. And because again, that's generally what's on people's mind right now. We've been lucky so far as this tape is being, as this program is being taped, it's actually raining out, which helps our county budget. We don't have to the high expense of plowing or pushing snow and doing all that. But back to those preparations. So all these trucks go from a construction mode to what happens to the typical truck to get ready for winter. This year's a little bit different for us. And by different, I mean, technology-wise, each one of our trucks is gonna be equipped with an AVL GPS system. That means that at any given time, I could go on my PCI work or my shop superintendent or even our road superintendents and view where that truck is almost instantly. And they can gather such information such as the plow being up, plow being down, wing up, wing down, if the salter's being used. We can also gain some information as far as if the truck has had mechanical issues and that will be sent to us as an email. So this is, we feel is gonna be very good technology for the future. Gives us a better handle of where our trucks are at. And if there's an emergency, we can take the closest truck, not just take the truck that's on a specific route, but if there's another route that's close and the other truck's far away, we'll just pull them and get them into that emergency to help whoever is in need. As far as the preparation goes, and I think I mentioned this to you in an email, a lot of our preparation starts at the fall of the year when we go out to the marsh and we measure the muskrat homes to see how high they are. And that's usually a good indication as far as how high the water's gonna get in the marsh if we're gonna get a lot of snow. And then we also check with the trappers as well to see if there's excess fat on some of the mink and stuff that they catch before the season starts. Highly scientific work. You also mentioned, isn't there a fuzzy caterpillar that you put a lot of weight on? Yep, the willy bear caterpillar is a big indicator for us as far as how much snow. And if that all fails, then we go back to the farmer's almanac and gauge a lot of our stuff on that. And what are they saying? How high were the muskrat houses this year? What are they saying for this year's winter? Well, you can talk to various people and everybody alludes back to the winter of 36, which obviously you and I were not here, but I guess it was pretty bad. And in fact, I've been asked how are we preparing for the winter of 36. And one, I don't know because I wasn't there, but two, I would have to say is that let's think of what 36 looked like and what our roads looked like and let's look back at what they are today and the size of our equipment, the road widths. I really don't believe you could... We maybe have had the winters of 36 already and people just didn't notice it because of the fact that we have more snow storage, we have the equipment to move it and technology's gotten a lot better. Good point, very good point. And thus far, it sure doesn't feel like we're gonna have that winter of 36 with the mild temperatures. However. That could change quick. That's how the winter of 36 started. All of December and January were pretty much dry and the whole winter came in February and March, March being the worst of the two months. We encourage you to go out immediately and start buying groceries and canned goods because this could be rough. Interesting. We've done a little research then on the winter of 36. Well, I've checked into it just to be prepared but we'll deal with it as it comes and a lot of our businesses is, we like to watch the forecast, we have some of the technology that's given to us by the state where we have our own meteorologist that we can contact to figure things out or help us out. We get warned of events within three hours before if it's gonna be a freezing rain event or what type of snow event it's gonna be. So those things we have in our back pocket but as we're all aware of, some of those forecasts can change within hours and hours much less days and days or months and months ahead. From time to time we both get questions from folks about well what about purchasing salt and how do you go about purchasing it and how do you make sure you get the best price and occasionally they may read in the paper from one year to the next that boy salt prices are going through the roof. What's the status of that, what's the process? Our process is like I said earlier, we in May will get the direction to check what our inventories are. We go on to statewide bid, not every county does that throughout the state. Some that are closer to depots where the salt comes into, feel there's a better advantage of buying it themselves and hauling it themselves. Our salt is trucked in, it's on average about $60 a ton. We do about 10,000 tons a year so about $600,000 of our budget goes into salt consumption. That can vary obviously it's been higher other years. We use a gauge that with the people I associate with they'll say well it wasn't that bad of a winter. In Wisconsin so our salt price shouldn't be up. Well on the other hand you gotta look at that globally or statewide or in United States wide. Some places may have gotten a lot more where some of our salt may have gone too so it really is a supply and demand thing as far as how salt is charged to us. Very good point. Are we storing all of that in Sheboygan County or is that how much we order and we can store a certain amount? We only store a certain amount. I think 7,500 tons is our capacity at a time. So we, obviously when we go through a weekend of events where we use a lot of it we will put our order in and it takes about a week, week and a half. As you can imagine if we're ordering and so is everybody else in our community so sometimes you have to plan a little bit ahead. What's the general ratio? Are we putting down predominantly salt? Is it a salt-sand mix and how is that decision made? It's all salt. Over the years, the 20 plus years that I've been involved in this starting as an operator and working my way up I started working with the sand years ago and what has come out of it are studies have shown that the sand is this there for an abrasive and a lot of times when you're dealing with higher speed traffic such as in a rural setting where the traffic is traveling at 55 miles an hour a lot of times the sand after the first three cars went over the top of it blew it to the side. So it really didn't have that all that a much effect. So it was determined at that point that it was better to use the salt instead of having to go back over and over and over again and reapplying the sand because the salt is gonna stay there because it melts almost instantly. And going off of that we've also have invested in what's called anti-icing tanks about half of our 42 units have tanks on that carry salt brine that we mix ourselves, break it down and it's kind of a chemical balance between the water and the salt and we inject that into the salt at the spinner. So as soon as that salt hits the road it's already activated. When you're putting down dry salt it takes traffic and stuff to break it down in order to start its melting agent. Now with the addition of the liquids it's working instantly and we're getting a better product and we can cut back on our usage of the rock salt. Have we tried any other approaches? Occasionally you'll read about beet juice or some new approach to de-icing areas or improving conditions. We have not gone with the beet juice and a lot of it has to do with the cost of it. It's not new but the product itself is relatively expensive. And in order to do it you have to, it's something that we can produce ourselves so it has to be trucked in and a lot of times they don't want to just mess with a half a load or three quarters of a load, it's a full load and those gallons can range, it could be range to a dollar a gallon and our capacity with liquids is probably about three to 4,000 gallons at a time. So it can get expensive especially applying it but what we do for some of our shaded areas that have high volume traffic prior to an event we have a truck that has a tank on it that can spray this stuff right onto the road and we'll do that with our bridge decks on I-43 as well. Every other day or so we go out and we spray those bridge decks. In this type of year, especially in December now we've had a lot of frost issues that a lot of everybody hasn't noticed as much. And by applying that salt brine doesn't form the ice or the thin layer of frost on those bridges because it melts that moisture down. And as you can imagine the bridge is cold on both up and on the top end and the bottom so that's a huge frost area for us. So if there's a little bit of moisture in the air and it's around that freezing mark we're gonna have frost on the bridges and it's very unsuspecting because the road's dry you get to the bridge and it's icy and as you can imagine most of the people on the interstate are traveling with their cruise control on and that's why a lot of our accidents or incidents happen around bridge decks. I've seen it a number of times. So you'll have the plows aren't set up for both clearly you'll have a separate truck that has the brine mix and then they'll just hit all the bridges in the air. That's correct, yeah. We have two units that go out and like I said about every other day the product will last about three days on the road depending upon the amount of moisture that's in the air obviously with everything that we applied either early this week or late last week is now gone due to rain events that we've had this week. Timing of sending the crews out there. The typical day if someone's working seven to four or eight to five or whatever it may be and the snow starts coming down during the days is there kind of a pattern or a way of attacking snow storms that you try to be as efficient as possible? The way we're structured at this point for hours is that if it would start to snow let's just say at 11 o'clock in the morning during the week we're gonna start to take care of that and we're gonna continue to move with it as long as the storm goes. We'll go up and tell about eight, eight, thirty and we'll pull our trucks back in on our lower volume highways. We do have a night crew if you will. It's a skeleton crew. Two guys come on in the second shift and mainly their focus is I-43 and State Highway 23. That's where the volume of traffic is moving. They will go off and do various locations for emergencies if needed but if that event increases we will add more staff to our nights and to try to keep as much stuff open as possible. And then if it continues through the night like I said the bulk of our crew will go home at eight o'clock, eight, thirty and we'll come back in at three o'clock in the morning depending upon the size of the storm. So going home at eight, eight, thirty p.m. Work in the next morning starting at three a.m. Trying to get as much cleared off before folks start heading to work. So for people to really have the expectation that roads are gonna be clear and there's gonna be a number of staff out there in the middle of night especially if you work third shift and that's when you're relying on good roads and frankly that's just not where the emphasis is. That's correct. We're not a 24 hour operation. We are a skeleton 24 hour operation but you know and that goes into even our summer events. We are called out for a lot of emergencies whether it's high wind, hailed events. Fortunately we don't have a lot of that if there's flooding, washing out. I mean so we are a 24 hour operation. It's just that we're not staffed that way. So we respond to the semis that are tipped over on the interstate and car fires, you know. So it's... You're not at full staff 24-7. That's correct. But you're operating 24-7. Yep. Yeah, no very good, good explanation. What if someone comes across a bad bridge that they're one of the first ones on the road in the morning and just saw the car in front of them, hit that and have an accident. Do you encourage people to call the highway department or the sheriff's department to report a slippery area? The best bet is to call the sheriff's department first. They have contact with our superintendents either by phone or by radio and that's how it's gonna be handled. In off hours when our superintendents are sleeping, when the night people are on, then the sheriff's department will call them directly and on the radio and say, can you take care of this hotspot that's causing some issues? Now this next question is gonna be one that I know you rarely ever hear about but every now and then, it seems a mailbox gets taken out out there. And I know your crews do an outstanding job and do their best to avoid those hundreds and hundreds of mailboxes but as I've personally experienced, when that snow is heavy and wet and those plows hit that, it's almost like hitting your mailbox with a two by four when those come by. So it may not be the wing that hit it, it's just that heavy snow. How does the highway department handle that? Because obviously I'm in jest, I do know you hear about mailboxes perhaps more than you care to. The physical damage should be caused by the plow in order for us to be taking care of it. Now with that being said, I'm sure we've replaced a few of them that maybe this snow just took care of and the heavy wet slushy stuff is the one that causes the issue. As you can imagine, if the truck is going 25 miles an hour, the stuff is coming off the end of that wing at about 40 or plus. So it's obviously it's not something we wanna go back and do. The best advice I could give you is that make sure it's secure at the beginning of the season, do your due diligence and make sure that everything is in top notch shape and we'll try to avoid it as much as possible. And Greg and I are very proud parents of two 16 year olds, both that play basketball and we like to trade war stories and obviously see them out there pounding the pavement and they both have recently started driving. So to all our viewers who have children who are just getting behind the wheel for the first time in their first winter conditions, any advice? Well, first of all, I wish we could go back and change legislation to say that. I think that every kid in the Midwest should spend a year with their temp so they have to drive through the winter without having to, I mean, it's, to me, it's really spooky. My daughter was, it's within two weeks that she's got her driver's license and this time of the season, it can go bad. I guess the advice I give to the parents and the kids, you know, stress, take your time, give yourself enough time, stay back from the plow equipment because you never know when they're gonna be backing up. And if it's that bad, don't go. Yeah, just slow down. Yep. And unfortunately our kids see us as adults driving and we're the role models and when we're racing to and from which we know we all often are, they tend to pick up that same habit and it's not good during the winter. No, it's not. We do our best to try to keep as much of the friction on the road as we possibly can but when it's falling sometimes at an inch and hour or less than that, it's very difficult to keep up with and as more cars pound it down, it even gets stickier and stickier and slipper and slipper. Yeah. Well, you and your team do a wonderful job out there and I think the key that people need to remember every winter is patience, not only slowing down when you're behind the wheel but recognizing that it takes some time to get to those, how many total miles of road? 2,100 lane miles. 2,100 lane miles, it takes some time and there are higher priorities and there's only so many staff and there's only so many dollars and all of that comes into the equation so folks need to be patient and we certainly appreciate that. Switching gears a little bit, back to the construction. Recently your department has been involved in building roundabouts and this has become more prevalent not only in the state but nationally. Set the stage a little bit. We've talked about this in the past when you've been on the program but there are real mixed feelings from some folks about roundabouts. Why are they becoming more prevalent? The statistics show that a roundabout will change the injury accidents in upwards of 90%. When you look at the construction or the configuration of a roundabout and how you have to go through it in that slow pace that we talked about earlier with the kids driving, obviously it's more of a vehicular incident where there's just property damage and not the injury accidents and that's really what our focus point is. We don't want to put them at every intersection but if you have an intersection that has a history such as the old K and E intersection that was just recently built this summer, if there's a history of those types of accidents, one, you can increase your funding with the severity of those accidents which that particular intersection is 90-10 funded by the federal government. So our crews built it this year. It turned out to be very well orchestrated, done well. We've gotten more compliments than we got complaints. I don't know if the people that don't care for roundabouts maybe are still avoiding it, I'm not sure but it's been a very, very good addition to that end of the, of Sheboygan County and again, it's has stopped basically all the accidents. Not there's still gonna be a few accidents in there but they aren't gonna be the life changing type of accidents that we've seen in other intersections. Personally, that's why I really think it's a good move. I know the first couple of times I've gone through a new roundabout it can feel a little uncomfortable. How's this working and how many accesses and exits are there but from a safety standpoint, no question that you're not gonna see the injuries that people see at stoplights or four-way stops would have you. And then also, frankly, I like the fact that you keep moving, that you're not stopping or have the long back up in traffic, it keeps things moving. That's one of the things that maybe really hasn't been studied and when you think about, we all talk about the carbon footprint when we're going into this green environment that we're into, the more time you spend at a stoplight or a stop sign waiting for somebody else, obviously, you're emitting more of your emissions and with a roundabout, you can continue to move and that's one thing I don't believe was measured yet and you're right. And one of the other positives is you never get lost, you just keep on going around and around. You miss your turn, go around here the next time. That's correct. We only have about five minutes remaining and we didn't spend a lot of time on construction, obviously good discussion of the roundabouts but please quickly touch on what were some of the big projects your department recently wrapped up and some big ones in the future. Okay, well, this year we were very fortunate to get the support that we did from our county board members and they took a look at our infrastructure and said, you know what, we need to keep up with our roads and do some more paving. So we were given some additional money to do some more paving. So we paved 27 miles this year and we should be paving around 30 miles so we're getting to where we need to be. So that went on. We've also completed the construction on Coney Trunk or Superior Avenue that is now complete. Next year we're gonna come back and put the top layer of asphalt on and we're gonna let it settle out where the storm sewers and the pipes have gone in and we'll finish that next year, which was a major accomplishment. I started back in 2008 and now we're finally completing that. Obviously all the state activities that went on up on I-43 was a challenge for a lot of travelers in this area but we're getting there. Once we get this stuff completed, the fixes that are out there are probably 15 year, 30 year, 50 year plus depending upon the improvement that was done. So we shouldn't have to see that type of activity for quite some time on those particular roads anyway. And what do you see in the next two, three, five years? I know you're real involved with planning and what you're gonna tackle next. What do you see as some big projects down the road? For next year we're looking at Coney Trunk J from 32 to Highland Road, which is about a two mile section that we would like to get accomplished and then taken care of. We're also looking at doing another 20 to 25 miles or 27 miles depending upon where our oil cost comes in for next year for paving. The following year we're looking at the next two miles of Coney Trunk J from Highland Road out to Coney Trunk M. It would be nice to get all these projects incorporated into one year and just knock it out but obviously funding's an issue. So that's one of those things that we have to prolong the process a little bit which sometimes is a little disheartening for businesses and residents but that's kind of how it is. Whether we're doing it or somebody else is doing it, you have to chop it up a little bit. Following that we're looking at doing some reconstruction up on LS near the bluff area in Arthur Whistling Straits is something that we're working on. Could be a real expensive endeavor. It could be. So areas that we have concerns for and are trying to take care of it, that's one of our areas that we need to be addressing more sooner than later. As you commented and it's certainly true not only 27 miles paved this year but the last few years the county board has really made a concerted effort to do more overlay and make sure we're taking care of our infrastructure because it's far more costly not to. Real quickly the difference between a mile of overlay versus repairing that damaged road versus completely reconstructing it. An overlay runs about $100,000 a mile. Pulverizing and repaving and putting a brand new four inch thick mat on there runs about 260,000 a mile and a complete reconstruction with ditches, asphalt, gravel, new pipes is about a million, million and a half a mile. So it absolutely pays and it's just frankly smart to take care of what we have 100,000 a mile versus 260 versus a million and that's all part of what the county board has to balance every year when they prepare their budget. Greg excellent overview covered a lot of ground and I'm getting the sign we need to wrap it up so thanks for joining us. Thank you for having me. And thank you to you and your team. You have excellent staff, you're doing excellent work and Greg like most departments have been tightening the belt and reduced their table of organization yet are continuing to do an excellent job so appreciate it. Thank you. Thank you for joining us. Until next month I hope you have a wonderful merry Christmas, happy holiday, new year and we look forward to having you back and next month our guest is going to be Jim to Beast our building services director who also will be talking about the importance of taking care of our buildings, departments, infrastructure and he has some very good staff as well so look forward to having him here and until then again, thanks for joining us.