Road salt situation: Supplies are down, conservation is the name of the game

MILWAUKEE (WITI) -- If you’ve been out on the roads this January, it’s likely you’ve encountered some not-so-cleared streets. We’ve heard a lot about cities in southeastern Wisconsin conserving their salt supply, but why?

“Everybody was kind of freaking out early on in the season about the shortage of salt,” Milwaukee Department of Public Works Sanitation Services Manager Wanda Booker said.

“All supplies were down to zero after last season,” Kevin Schuele, president of PAK Technologies said.

For nearly a decade, Schuele and his company have been a big part of salt distribution in the Midwest, acting as a contractor for companies such as Morton Salt. He says after last year’s record salt usage there was little his sources could do to catch up with demand.

“It takes those salt miners a long time to dig that out of the ground and to get it back into the supply chain, to get product blended, packaged and in warehouses ready for this year. It was a supply situation that we just didn’t have enough to meet the demand," Schuele said.

The supply situation sent people like David Frank of David J. Frank Landscaping into panic mode. In September Frank told FOX6 News: “I think it could be very problematic and some of them may not even be able to get material.”

Luckily, Mother Nature played nice. Now Frank is much more optimistic.

“We had the sixth least snowiest December in our state’s history. Then we had that two weeks of near or into the 40° temperatures," Frank said.

December also made a big difference for the city’s supplies, according to Booker.

“We had a finite tons of salt that we had available to us at the beginning of the season and with it not snowing in December, for every day that it didn’t snow it saved us about 500 to 600 tons of salt," Booker said.

Local municipalities and businesses avoided the storm as it relates to salt supply. However, getting and paying for that sodium chloride has become a blizzard of its own.

"This used to be something just like ordering a pizza. You’d pick up the phone and you’d just get what you need and that’s changed a lot,” Frank said.

What does he mean by that? Let’s say you walk into a Topper's Pizza and order the Topper's Classic -- only instead of getting all of your toppings from one store, you have to call Detroit to get the pepperoni, New Orleans for the sausage, the green pepper from Morocco, and the onion from Egypt. Want more toppings? You have more calls to make.

“Our firm has developed six or seven sources of salt and we’re using a number of different vendors than we have in the past because, again, our traditional vendors have all cut the quantities down,” Frank said.

Finding this year’s supply wasn’t his only problem.

“Pricing we’re getting right now is still two to three times what we were paying last year," Frank said.

It’s a cost his customers are feeling as well.

‘’We had to pass that through. We didn’t have the margins to be able to absorb that," Frank said.

The salt in the wound? Those prices might not come down any time soon!

“If we have a lot of snow and this salt gets consumed, it will be an issue for next year because we still haven’t had enough to, inventories are building but they’re not quite to the level they have to be yet," Schuele said.

Schuele said the determining factor will simply be the number of salting events, or snow storms, that we see the rest of this season. There is some good news. Schuele believes the typical bag of salt you might buy for your home won’t jump much in price. That’s because most of the companies behind those products have long-term contracts guaranteeing how much they pay for salt.