Dollywood Coaster Turns Heads

Story first appeared in USA Today

PIGEON FORGE, Tenn. – Dolly Parton does not do roller coasters. She'll tell you she has too much to lose. Like her wig. She makes no exceptions. Not even for the newest ride, Wild Eagle, which recently made its debut at the entertainer's namesake Dollywood theme park. Not even if it cost a cool $20 million — the most ever spent on a single attraction in the park's history. And not even if it's the first so-called steel-wing coaster in the entire USA.

One patron has already taken the plunge on the Wild Eagle 25 times while doing live TV and radio interviews by Dollywood's opening day in late March. The elementary school teacher from the Dallas area is also editor of RollerCoaster! magazine, published by American Coaster Enthusiasts and has rode more than 900 coasters at last count. His next stop: Six Flags Great America in Chicago, where a similar wing coaster takes off in mid-May. Another variation opens at Hersheypark in Hershey, Pa., on May 26.
You have to be the sort of person who knows a zero-G roll from a giant flat spin to understand why these new coasters are such a big deal. But after a two-minute, 22-second spin on the Wild Eagle, even a hesitant rider begins to get it.

What makes it special
What makes a satisfying coaster is its extremeness but also its grace. This one has elements of both. Because there's no track above or below you, you get these panoramic views.
The wing coasters are also buzzworthy among hard-core fans simply because they're the Next Big Thing.
The first wing coaster rolled out last year in Italy. A second launched in March in England's Thorpe Park, where test-run photos showed mannequins returning to the station without their limbs. Retired fighter pilots were recruited to take their place.

Take a $750 spin for charity
Dollywood took a more charitable approach in drumming up interest. The first 52 rides were auctioned online for about $750 a pop and sold out in less than 12 hours. The $37,000 in proceeds will benefit the American Eagle Foundation, which rehabilitates birds of prey and is headquartered at Dollywood.  The $750 donations amounted to approximately $5.28 per second of the ride.

A regular season-pass holder who drove five hours from her home in Lebanon, Ohio, may have spent less money on the venture, but her time investment is considerable. The 65-year-old teacher's aide arrived at the park at 7:30 a.m., waited for the gates to open and inched her way along in line, finally climbing aboard the Wild Eagle more than four hours later.
Exiting the coaster after her second ride of the day, she is positively giddy stating that she would be back in May.


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High Power Storms Hit the Midwest

Story first appeared in the Los Angeles Times.

More than 100 tornadoes were reported across the Midwest and Plains states, leaving at least five dead in Oklahoma and hundreds of thousands of families without electricity.

Residents searched Sunday through damaged homes for anything they could salvage. Emergency crews, meanwhile, were trying to repair downed power lines.

The National Weather Service said the storm systems were weakening and that additional tornadoes were unlikely. But forecasters warned that strong thunderstorms were expected as far east as Michigan.

Five people were killed -- three of them children -- and more than two dozen were injured when a suspected tornado ripped through Oklahoma. Many of the victims were in a mobile home park in Woodward, about 140 miles (225 kilometers) northwest of Oklahoma City. Streets in the 12,000-resident town were left dotted with mangled vehicles, toppled power lines and leveled buildings.

A local retired firefighter said he spotted the tornado when it knocked down power lines, causing flashes of light, and saw a radio tower's blinking lights go black shortly after midnight. He later saw a man emerge from a twisted, wrecked sport utility vehicle that had been tossed along the side of the road.

Search teams were scouring rubble for trapped and injured as the sun came up. They're still going door to door and in some cases, there are piles of rubble and they are having to sift through the rubble.

In the tiny western Iowa town of Thurman, piles of toppled trees lined the streets in front of homes where missing walls and roofs exposed soaked living rooms.

The storms were part of an exceptionally strong system that the Storm Prediction Center in Norman, Oklahoma, which specializes in tornado forecasting, had warned about for days.

The center took the unusual step of warning people more than 24 hours in advance of a possible "high-end, life-threatening event." Forecasters had worried the storms would hit overnight, when people are less likely to hear warning sirens and pay attention to weather reports.

At the storm's height, tornadoes popped up faster than they could be tallied. The center's spokesman, said that the weather service had received at least 120 reports of tornadoes by dawn Sunday.

He warned the threat wasn't over for those across several states in the nation's interior. Forecasters predicted the possibility for storms Sunday in a swath that stretched from southern Texas to northern Michigan.

The American Red Cross summoned volunteers to drive relief trucks from Oklahoma City to aid the rescue crews in and around Woodward he said were pressed to the limit by the immediate disaster response.

Numerous tornadoes were reported in Kansas, though mostly in rural parts of the western and central sections of the state.

A reported tornado in Wichita that struck late Saturday night caused damage at McConnell Air Force Base and the Spirit AeroSystems and Boeing plants. A mobile home park was heavily damaged in the city, although no injuries or deaths were reported.

The county where Wichita is located was declared a state of disaster and said preliminary estimates suggest damages could be as high as $283 million.

A hospital in Creston, about 75 miles (120 kilometers) southwest of Des Moines, suffered roof damage and had some of its windows blown out by the storm, but patients and staff were not hurt. Medical center officials were calling other area hospitals to determine how many beds they had available in case they needed to move patients.
In Nebraska, large hail shattered windows and tore siding from houses in and around Petersburg, about 140 miles (225 kilometers) northwest of Omaha. In southeast Nebraska, an apparent tornado took down barns, large trees and some small rural structures.

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Best Buy Losing the Fight

Story first appeared in the Los Angeles Times.

How can Best Buy be saved?

The question has been swirling around the huge retailer for a couple of years, as its same-store sales have been falling. But it picked up steam last week with the sudden resignation of the Chief Executive, who had been in his job less than three years.

The unceremonious departure looked at first as though it was connected with his professional performance, which hadn't thrilled many Best Buy watchers. But it soon transpired that the reason had something to do with questionable personal conduct, reportedly involving a female subordinate.

His method of leaving his job was the most modernistic step he's taken in years — personal behavior has been trending higher in recent years as a rationale for top-level firing in both industry and sports.

In most other respects, Best Buy under recent leadership was moving backward. The stores have been looking more forlorn and less like the teeming shoppers' carnivals of years past, and the inventory choices shrinking. Meanwhile the sales staff comes off as less knowledgeable and more indifferent. Former customers of the extinct Circuit City and Border's, the last big retailers to go down this road, must be feeling a sense of deja vu.

The challenges facing Best Buy are easy to discern. It's caught between the Scylla and Charybdis of Apple and Amazon.com. Apple has become a retail juggernaut, generating astronomical sales estimated at $5,600 per square foot at its snazzy toy-stores-for-grown-ups.

Best Buy's figure, according to its most recent annual report, is $866 per square foot — respectable for a retailer in its class, if not in Apple's league. Amazon consistently beats Best Buy on price, even without counting the advantage it gets by not charging sales tax for many customers outside its home state of Washington.

That advantage will soon be extinct in California, as it is in several other populous states. But even without the sales tax bump, Amazon beats Target andWal-Mart as well as Best Buy on the prices of many items, as investment analysts at William Blair & Co. recently documented.

Like Best Buy, those chains suffer from "showrooming," in which customers try out merchandise on their sales floors and then place their orders at Amazon for less money. But Target and Wal-Mart aren't facing the sickness unto death that appears to be confronting Best Buy. Not at the moment, anyway.

Sure, judging Best Buy against premier marketer Apple and online-only Amazon is a mite unfair. Apple stores sell essentially five branded products with cult-like followings (Mac desktops, Mac notebooks, the iPad, the iPhone and the iPod).

Amazon doesn't have to build and maintain walk-in stores; on the other hand, after launching in 1995, it spent so relentlessly on distribution and technology systems that it didn't show a profit until 2003. But that spending yielded what today stands as the best customer experience on the Web.

Every retailer is different, like Tolstoy's unhappy families, and good lifeline-caliber ideas can be found anywhere. The architect of Apple's retail store strategy, came from Target at a time when Apple's lack of any retail strategy threatened its very existence.

Nothing is stopping Best Buy from picking out the best ideas in the field and adapting them to its own space. At least that would be an improvement over its current strategy, which seems to be to pick out everyone's worst ideas and try to take them to the bank. These include its shift toward smaller, mall-based storefronts with limited merchandise.

The former CEO's last major announcement before resigning was that he would close 50 of the chain's 1,100 U.S. big-box stores while expanding small-format locations.

So what are the best ideas?

One is that expertise sells. The first Apple stores opened in early 2001 — believe it or not, this was before the iPod. Since then, they've built on the company's reputation for hip design and first-class technical service. The products are laid out on tables to encourage the touchy-feely experience. Employees are ubiquitous but unobtrusive.

The techs at the Genius Bar seem trained in Apple technology to the last brain cell. The hard sell is so deeply submerged in the store experience that you may not even know you've been sold until you're out the door with a MacBook in hand. But you'll think the staff has identified your need and found a way to meet it.

Another retail lesson worth internalizing is that a chain doesn't have to be pitched toward the affluent to offer good service.
Nordstrom, which occupies a high-end market segment, is known for its attentive sales staff. But walk into a Men's Wearhouse and you don't have to chase after a salesperson with a butterfly net — typically you're greeted promptly by someone in full command of the inventory on the floor. By the way, Men's Wearhouse collects more revenue per square foot of selling space than Nordstrom ($451 versus $431), according to the firms' most recent annual reports.

Put these two notions together, and you might just have a new Best Buy paradigm. As our lives become more enslaved by technology, the need for expert help sorting out how best to integrate every Bluetooth- and Wi-Fi-enabled thing grows greater.

Best Buy nodded to this reality with its techie-staffed Geek Squad. The Squadsters are not especially well-trained to divine a customer's tech-related problems and cobble together a solution from all the inventory at hand. In any case, the last time I was in a store, two of them gave me two completely different answers to the problem I brought them; I suppose it's to their credit that only one of them was wrong.

The chain could do worse than to hire and train more employees with real knowledge of technology and an incentive to solve customers' dilemmas instead of selling them useless extended warranties, which is by far the most offensive aspect of dealing with Best Buy.

And how about staffing up? It hasn't been unusual for the first salesperson to accost me inside a Best Buy to be an embedded sales agent for a service such as Verizon or DirecTV. Yet the big idea in the last Christmas season was to hire only half as many seasonal workers as the year before.

Then there's the dilemma of online. Conventional retailers wasted years treating their online arms as though they were fifth columns.

Best Buy's online integration has been so poor that in the week before Christmas it canceled what may have been thousands of online orders placed as early as November for lack of inventory, certainly a mortal sin in customer service.

The chain may be crippled by "showrooming," but why not offer customers looking over items in the store an incentive to place their orders through Bestbuy.com rather than Amazon? And the company may have to bite the bullet and extend its price match policy to cover not only its brick-and-mortar competitors but online merchants too.

All this points to lower profit margins ahead, but that's the cost of investing in new strategy and tactics. But if the choice is between rebuilding your customer base or letting it fade away like those of Circuit City, CompUSA and other retailers done in by, well, Best Buy, the road is clear. The worst thing that could happen to the chain is for the question to change from "how Best Buy can be saved" to "can it be saved," especially if the answer is no.

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Oil and Gas Exploration is Driving Truck Sales

Story first appeared in the Detroit Free Press.

The surge in oil and natural-gas exploration is providing a welcome spark for pickup sales, taking up slack from a construction industry that remains in the doldrums.

The flip side of higher gas prices is that energy companies look for more oil, as well as its less expensive derivative, natural gas.

To be sure, a gradually improving economy and pent-up demand are drawing truck customers into the showroom.

Every time we add a number of wells, we add a lease operator - and that requires a truck. According to the vice president of Traverse City-based West Bay Exploration, which has 12 to 14 people operating about 80 wells throughout the state. That includes 43 wells in Jackson County, where oil exploration is booming.  As production increases, you're going to see more wells and more truck sales.  In Michigan that's still a small amount, but in places like Ohio and North Dakota and Pennsylvania, that's significant.

General Motors' full-size pickup sales rose 14% in March compared with a year earlier as the Chevrolet Silverado posted a 12.1% increase and sales of the GMC Sierra jumped 19.2%.

Ford F-Series pickup sales rose 13.6% for the first quarter to 143,827.

Chrysler's Dodge Ram sales were up 23% in March from a year earlier, while Toyota Tundra sales rose 10.3%.

The U.S. Energy Department's Energy Information Administration said in its March energy outlook that crude oil production should increase from 5.6 million barrels per day in 2011 to 5.83 million barrels per day in 2012.

The EIA also said natural gas production reached a new monthly record of 2.577 trillion cubic feet in January, an increase of 11.6% from a year earlier and 16% above January 2009.

It has stabilized around the core customer who really needs a truck, and many of those buyers have been waiting for the economy to recover before replacing their old vehicle.

sales of heavy-duty trucks are particularly strong -- and a lot of that can be attributed to the oil and gas segment. Other industries, including the telecommunications sector, are also stimulating truck demand.

The energy boom has flourished particularly in places like western North Dakota, where unemployment was at a national low of 3.1% in February.

The U.S. oil and gas extraction subsector added about 26,300 jobs from March 2011 to March 2012, according to preliminary estimates by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. The industry employed about 193,100 last month, including geoscientists, petroleum engineers, pump system operators and wellhead pumpers.

The CEO of the Automobile Dealers Association of North Dakota, said pickups are essential for hauling equipment, pulling trailers, transporting fuel tanks and generators and carrying passengers to drill sites. Currently dealers don't have enough trucks.  The general terrain is rough, and cannot be traversed by a coupe or sedan.  Both the agricultural sector and the oil sector rely heavily on pickup trucks.

Independent oil and natural gas companies have an average of 12 employees and drill about 95% of new wells.

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Unpaid Taxes Eating Into Your Tax Refund

Story first appeared in the Detroit Free Press.

The joy of going out and spending a tax refund on that new living room furniture set you've had your eye on, could be short-lived if you owe past taxes.

The Internal Revenue Service is warning taxpayers that the U.S. Department of Treasury's Financial Management Service, which issues federal tax refunds, can use part or all of your federal tax refund to cover specific unpaid debts.

So before you dream about spending that refund, consider:

• Do you owe state or federal income taxes from the past? Your federal refund will be offset to pay those taxes.

• Do you have debt outstanding for child support or student loans? Again, the Treasury can use your refund to offset those debts.

The IRS notes that taxpayers would receive a notice if some debt is automatically paid off with refund money.

The notice would include the original refund amount, your offset amount, the agency receiving the payment and its contact information.

The publisher of Fastweb.com and FinAid.org, said what's known as a "Treasury Offset" occurs after someone defaults on a federal student loan -- both the federally guaranteed student loans and the direct loan programs. The offset typically happens about a year after the borrower defaults. And both federal and state income tax refunds can be intercepted.

In some cases, a spouse could mount an innocent spouse defense to protect his or her share of the refund from being offset.

There are options if you dispute the actual debt or the amount taken from the refund. But you'd need to contact the agency shown on the notice -- not the IRS.

Of course, sometimes there's the case where only one spouse is responsible for that debt. So, maybe the spouse can get that new dining room table they've been looking at.

If you filed a joint return and you're not responsible for the debt, but you're entitled to a portion of the refund, you can file IRS Form 8379, or Injured Spouse Allocation.

A certified public accountant and director of the tax-assistance program of the Accounting Aid Society of Detroit, said some taxpayers might be tempted to not file jointly, as one spouse owes debts that are subject to the tax refund offset.

However, he warned that if they file separately, certain credits and deductions are not available.

So in general, it is often best to file jointly to get the largest refund and file the Form 8379 to protect the part of the refund owed to the injured spouse. The Form 8379 can be filed with the tax return if a refund offset is anticipated.

The IRS notes that you'd want to follow instructions for Form 8379 carefully to avoid delays. If you don't receive a notice that spousal relief was granted or you don't receive a refund, it's possible to contact the Treasury's Offset Call Center at 800-304-3107 weekdays.

The Michigan Department of Treasury also offsets refunds for certain debts and then the state mails taxpayers a Form 743, Income Allocation for Non-obligated Spouse. That form must be completed and returned within 30 days. Only the Form 743 received from Michigan Treasury can be submitted.  The Form 743 is not otherwise available and is only issued after processing of the return.

It's important that taxpayers anticipating a Michigan state tax refund offset on a joint Michigan return watch for this Form 743 in the mail and submit it in a timely fashion.

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Japanese Nuclear Plants Get Strict on Restart

Story first appeared in The Detroit news.

Tokyo— Japan is setting stricter, clearer safety guidelines for nuclear power plants to ease public concern about restarting reactors idled after the disasters a year ago.  A Power Plant Engineering Expert Witness should be involved in the proceedings to ensure that proper protocols are followed.

Facing a national power crunch, the government is anxious to restart two reactors in Fukui, western Japan, before the last operating reactor of the 54 in the country goes offline in May.

But the public strongly opposes nuclear energy since the meltdowns at the Fukushima Dai-ichi power plant, and local leaders are reluctant to approve restarting any of the reactors.

The guidelines announced Friday are more extensive than computer-simulated "stress tests" designed to estimate how reactors would cope in the event of a major earthquake and tsunami like what overwhelmed Fukushima Dai-ichi last year. Unlike in France and other countries where stress tests are meant to find weaknesses or suspend a facility, Japan tried to use them as a safety guarantee. Many people questioned the objectivity of the tests, though two reactors passed them.

If utilities meet the new guidelines, authorities hope the public will be convinced the reactors are safe, including the two in Ohi, Fukui prefecture, that have finished regular safety checks and the stress tests and are ready to restart.

The Economy and Trade Minister called the guidelines "easy to understand" criteria that aim to set higher standards for natural disasters, but which do not factor in terrorist attacks, airplane accidents and other emergencies.

The guidelines, based on 30 recommendations adopted last month by the Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency, require nuclear power plants to install filtered vents that could reduce radiation leaks in case of an accident, as well as a device to prevent hydrogen explosions. About 13 of the recommendations — the most crucial measures needed to secure cooling functions and prevent meltdowns as in Fukushima — were implemented, but the rest were not. The guidelines did not set deadlines for the steps to be finished.

The Chief Cabinet Secretary said the government can order utilities to restart reactors regardless of local opposition, because obtaining residents' consent is not legally required.

The officials will make a final decision based on NISA's evaluation and the reactors' operator Kansai Electric Power Co.'s safety implementation plans.

Critics and officials in cities and towns near Fukui are requesting explanations for the hastily-published guidelines.

The outspoken mayor of Osaka — a top shareholder of Kansai Electric — criticized the government for compiling the new guideline in just two days.

All but one of Japan's 54 reactors have been shut down for inspections, required every 13 months. None have been restarted since the March 11, 2011, tsunami set off meltdowns in three reactors at the Fukushima Dai-ichi plant. Energy Power Plant Expert Witnesses provide extensive project management experience, that could help in the maintenance and restarting process of these reactor stations.

The nation's last operational reactor, on the northern island of Hokkaido, goes off line in early May. If none of the reactors are restarted, Japan could face power shortages this summer. Before the crisis, Japan depended on nuclear power for one-third of its electricity.

To make up for the shortfall, Japan has expanded production at conventional gas- and oil-fired plants. Noda has promised to reduce Japan's reliance on nuclear power over time and plans to lay out a new energy policy by the summer, but his government faces pressure from big businesses to quickly get reactors back on line and maintain nuclear power to keep the economy afloat.

Fukui, home to 13 reactors clustered in four complexes along the Sea of Japan coast, is called Japan's nuclear alley.

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Kansas Prepares for Gold-Rush Style Oil Boom

Article by Associated Press:
 

Between the buttes and rolling terrain of the Gypsum Hills in south-central Kansas, a massive drilling rig grinds deep into the earth, seeking to reach the oil-rich Mississippian Lime formation buried some 5,000 feet deep. Just beyond the rig, executives intently watch the progress.

Natural gas, fossil fuels and domestic oil production have the potential to enrich production companies

Modern prospectors are punching holes across south-central Kansas, in a gold rush-style hunt for oil and gas that could yield big returns not just for oil producers but also for the economy of many US states.
The boom is occurring even as domestic natural gas exploration begins to slow nationally.  In county courthouses across much of Kansas, scores of researchers comb through dusty land records stacked atop folding tables set up in hallways for them, toiling for producers and speculators alike who are scrambling to snap up millions of acres of mineral rights. Leases which just three years ago went for $30 an acre are now fetching $3,000 an acre in drilling hotspots. Awe-struck real estate agents watch incredulously as mineral rights fetch higher prices than the land itself.

Drilling has only just begun as gas production spreads north across a wide swath of the central Kansas prairie.

Look hard and you can see the first hints of change wafting through once sleepy rural hamlets. It's already tough to find a hotel room for the night or a rental property to live in. There's talk of possibly setting up "man camps" outside towns to house the anticipated influx of oilfield workers. Restaurants now seem busier than usual. And the local traffic sure feels like it has picked up on those old rural roads.  Hutchinson-based Osage Resources, is among a handful of producers behind an emerging oil boom sparked by modern technologies using horizontal drilling and a technique known as hydraulic fracturing, or fracking to coax out oil and gas.  Energy companies have already reaped fortunes off the Mississippian Lime Play in Oklahoma and are now following the rock formation northward into Kansas, where millions of acres of mineral rights have been leased in the past two or three years.

If the Mississippian Lime Play unfolds as expected, the economic boost in Kansas could be enormous. Severance taxes will swell state's coffers.
Landowners will reap royalties. Oilfield workers will find hundreds, if not thousands, of good jobs typically paying $50,000 annually. Main Street business in countless small towns will thrive again.

Domestic oil and gas production represents an exciting opportunity for growing the Kansas economy while helping to secure greater energy independence for the country with more jobs and revenue kept in the United States versus American dollars sent abroad.
But with horizontal drilling still in its infancy in America, all those economic impacts have yet to be fully felt. Kansas locals, who have seen other oil booms come and go, remain wary.

The new-fangled wells are essentially vertical wells with a horizontal bend at the oil-rich lime formation. Fracking, a technique used in Kansas since 1947, pushes water and sand down the hole to open up natural fractures in the rock and increase permeability. That combination of old and new technologies allows producers to extract as much as five to 10 times more oil and gas from a horizontal well than a conventional vertical well.

The potential production from the Mississippian Lime Play — and its impact on domestic energy supplies — remains uncertain. But the use of horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing to unlock energy supplies previously unavailable in the United States is now in play in places like Pennsylvania, Wyoming, Colorado, New Mexico, Texas, Oklahoma and Louisiana.

Oklahoma-based SandRidge Energy a company that has already spent $350 million to acquire nearly 2 million acres of mineral rights in Kansas and Oklahoma — with a majority of those leased acres located across a vast swath of central Kansas.

This year alone, SandRidge expects to pour $700 million into developing the Mississippian Lime Play in those two states. The company now has 21 drilling rigs to drill 50 wells in Kansas and 350 wells in Oklahoma this year.
Next year the company plans to have 45 rigs drilling 675 wells. To hold on to its leases, the company must drill a well every mile or so.

Once that is done — something that could take five years — SandRidge will go back and drill more wells until they have three wells per square mile. Within the next dozen years or so, SandRidge alone expects to punch more than 5,000 wells in Kansas.

Shell Oil and Chesapeake Energy are also drilling in Kansas, along with smaller independent Kansas energy producers.

Shell said it has acquired leases in a seven-county area in southern Kansas and is just now drilling its second exploratory well in Harper County. It plans to run three or four drilling rigs this year. Osage Resources plans to drill 216 horizontal wells to fully develop its Barber County lease.

Reports indicate that many oil rig workers of are working many long shifts and also enduring long commutes with many hours of daily driving just to get to the drilling rig. Oilfield workers log 12-hour work shifts before driving back home. They often work seven days straight, seven days off. One of the concerns with working such long hours is fatigue and the greater risk for work site accidents or becoming injured at work. Many oilfield workers have been requesting workers compensation insurance quotes from leading insurance companies.    

The demand for oil field workers has skyrocketed in recent months and the amount of drilling and domestic natural gas exploration projects has also increased dramatically in 2012.
Each horizontal well costs about $3 million to develop and typically pays for itself within 18 months of production. The average rate of return on investment is 90 percent.

Domestic oil and natural gas production is quite attractive at this time as oil prices continue to pace at high levels. In past decades, Kansas punched some 7,000 conventional vertical wells into the Mississippian Lime.

Meanwhile, the Sierra Club said it is concerned about the impact of fracking on water tables and underground aquifers, while the fracking industry contends the wells are safe.  The Mississippian Lime, for example, is 5,000 feet deep, while groundwater typically lies 500 to 1,000 feet deep — with a lot of geological barriers separating the two. Environmentalists want safeguards such as a requirement that drillers provide a list of toxic chemicals they are using and submit a test of the water table for analysis before drilling to pinpoint the culprit if chemicals are later found in groundwater, says a spokesman for the Kansas chapter of the Sierra Club. 

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Mild Winter Allows Big Budget Savings

Story first appeared in USA Today.

In the course of an average winter, the National Weather Service says Syracuse, N.Y., gets about 118 inches of snow.

Preparing for a similar onslaught this winter, the city set aside about $2 million for salt, equipment maintenance and overtime hours, says the first deputy commissioner of Syracuse's Department of Public Works. The 2011-12 snow season, however, delivered 50.5 inches, letting Syracuse accumulate what was called "very unusual" savings of about $1 million, roughly half its snow-removal budget for November through April.

Syracuse was one of many normally snow-burdened cities in the Northeast, Midwest and Mid-Atlantic that benefited from the unusually warm winter weather.

•Minneapolis, which got 22.3 inches compared with its average of 50.7, spent about $2.8 million less this year on snow and ice removal in January through March than it did last year, said the city's director of public works. The city has a $9 million snow and ice budget.

•Milwaukee spent about $2 million less than it does on average from January to the end of March this year, said the sanitation services manager for the city's Department of Public Works

•Louisville, through late February, spent about $3.5 million less on winter weather-related expenses than last year. The spokesman for the Mayor, said the savings played a large role in closing the $12 million city budget shortfall projected for this fiscal year.

•Cleveland's savings stem mostly from the $1.5 million left as of the end of March from a salt budget of $3.3 million for October 2011 through 2012, said the director of public works. The city was hit with 38.5 inches in the 2011-12 season compared with an average of 63.7.

National Weather Service spokesman, citing data from the Rutgers Global Snow Lab, said snow this winter covered about 237,000 fewer square miles in the U.S. than on average from 1981 to 2010, making the 2011-12 season the third-lowest of winter snow cover in 46 years of recorded satellite data.

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