#NYC spent $12M per inch of snow plowed last winter: report

Despite paltry amounts of snow last winter, NYC taxpayers really got plowed.

The city paid roughly $12 million for every inch of snow pushed to the curb, new data shows — 12 times the amount the city laid out per inch in 2003.

But don’t only blame government waste for the eye-popping figure — $57 million spent on 4.8 inches, tucked into an Independent Budget Office review.

Blame the mild weather, analyst Daniel Huber told The Post.

“It didn’t snow very much,” he said, “and some of that money was spent on prep — just like every year — whether snow falls or not.”

Those fixed costs for the Sanitation Department run the gamut, according to Huber — from training drivers to repairing plows to replenishing the salt supply.

Snow removal is so expensive because of all the specialized equipment it takes to open up the city’s 19,000 lane-miles of roadway, Sanitation spokesman Josh Goodman told The Post.

There aren’t only 2,300 plows and sets of chains to put on the garbage trucks but mammoth ice machines that melt 60 tons of snow an hour, smaller plows for bike lanes and intersections, and front-end loaders to move 300,000 tons of salt.

“This isn’t like shoveling your walkway,” Goodman said. “It’s an enormous, complicated operation for which we spend all year planning.”

Then throw in the incidentals of any given year that jack up the per-inch cost: maybe an ice storm that depletes the salt pile; or a weekend snow dump, which comes with pricey OT; a forecasted blizzard that brings out the trucks but turns into a dusting.

Over the past two decades, the per-inch cost jumped from $1 million in 2003 to $4 million in 2012 to $12 million in 2020 — mostly because of snowfall amounts and higher salt and fuel prices.

Huber’s analysis also shows the city has under-budgeted for snow removal in 13 of the past 18 years. Fiscal 2020 was one of only five since 2003 when the snow-removal budget — $112 million — was bigger than actual expenditures. The other four years were 2019, 2013, 2012 and 2008.

​In the past 18 years, the cumulative shortfall totals $362 million. The starkest example of under-budgeting was in 2011, when 61.9 inches blanketed Central Park. The city allocated only $39 million that season to snow removal but ended up spending $125 million. The per-inch cost: $2 million.

The city misses the mark so often because the snow budget is frozen— locked in place by the City Charter, which requires the amount to be an average of spending for the preceding five years. The average, Huber explained, doesn’t factor in the higher prices for salt and fuel or any wage increases for DSNY workers.

If this coming winter is snowy, the city will get buried in red again because the $101 million budget— based on the five-year average formula — is $11 million less than 2020’s $112 million.

Huber figures 26 inches, roughly the annual average in Central Park, would push spending a modest $3 million over budget, to $104 million. But a 60-inch season could cost as much as $159 million — a $58 million shortfall.