FALCONER – The town of Ellicott unanimously voted to create a new reserve fund for the highway department. This reserve comes from a need to keep extra funding in case of a winter of extreme weather conditions. Town officials hope that this reserve will prevent the use of unrelated reserve funding and give the town a safety net in the event of high winter costs.

The Highway Extreme Winter Recovery Reserve was established by the board members at the recent meeting on Dec. 2. At this meeting, Highway Supervisor Robert Pickett Jr. made note of the potential reasoning behind the establishment of this fund. Pickett stated that, earlier this year, the department was tasked with updating the reserve funds as a result of some resolutions put forward by the town. During these updates, Pickett spoke with Town Clerk Amy Bellardo about the uses of these reserve funds, especially in the event of a month of higher than usual costs.

“It’d be nice to establish this just for, you know, those odd winters where we need a little extra money, mostly wages or salt,” said Pickett. “(We’re) just making one so we can put money in it for anticipated, unexpected winter costs.”

Pickett said the conversation with Bellardo led to the conclusion that the current road repair reserve should not be the source of extra funds if the town should experience a harsh winter that leads to higher than average costs. Pickett also noted that of the three reserve funds that the highway department has, none are applicable to the extra cost of an extreme winter. Therefore, it would not be proper to use these funds for a misappropriated purpose, and thus a winter reserve would set money aside that can be specifically allocated to these costs.

“Like this month, we had 92 hours of overtime in the last five days, because it was all holiday weekend,” said Pickett. “We kind of determined that we really shouldn’t take money out of our road repair reserve if we run into a bad winter.”

Pickett also referenced the increase in sales tax that the town will be receiving during this fiscal year. As a result, Pickett made note of the possibility of having extra money left in the budget at the end of the year. This money could potentially go towards funding some of this new reserve.