Terry Harmon sweeps after a load of salt is delivered to the city. Half of Lawrence's 4,000-ton order for the coming winter has been delivered. Officials are hoping for a less severe winter but are still trying to avert a repeat of last season's salt shortage by ordering early.

Four months after seeing their road salt supplies depleted from a harsh winter, local road and street departments are well on the way to replenishing stock.

“The problem was we had no carryover like we did the last six or seven years,” said Tom Orzulak, street division manager for the city of Lawrence. “Last year, I was ready to go to McDonald’s and get salt packets. I was completely out. Out. I had to increase the order to replenish my safety net.”

Officials with Lawrence and Douglas County public works departments teamed up to order salt in May for the coming winter driving season.

Orzulak said the order was made a bit earlier than usual after suppliers advised the departments to order early and spread out delivery to avoid the crunch when icy weather started in November. Half of the city’s 4,000-ton order has been delivered, he said.

Mike Perkins, Douglas County Public Works operations manager, said the county added 3,500 tons to the combined order. The price was $37.78 a ton compared with $35.49 a ton in 2007, he said.

“I can tell you there was a big spread in bids,” he said. “Some were $10 to $12 more.”

The Kansas Department of Transportation also acted early to restock salt supplies. Kim Qualls, public affairs officer for KDOT’s northwest district, said the agency’s bunkers were full.

The local road departments were right to order early, said Richard Hanneman, president of the Salt Institute, a trade association for the salt industry that’s based in Alexandria, Va.

It’s been a seller’s market for salt suppliers the past few months as road and street departments rush to replenish supplies and mines rebuild stockpiles after the hardest winter in years.

“Everyone was out of salt,” Hanneman said. “The whole pipeline, if you will, was empty. So we started out having to refill that pipeline.”

As the industry attempted to fill that demand, a number of state road departments artificially inflated demand by placing large orders to ensure they wouldn’t be in the same situation next winter, Hanneman said. Illinois ordered 400,000 tons more than the previous year and Iowa ordered 52 percent more, he said.

Another concern was the added cost of competition for barges shipping salt north from Louisiana mines, Hanneman said. Salt used to be an inexpensive return cargo for grain barges headed to the Gulf, but now many of those barges were destined to ethanol plants in the Midwest, while demand for steel and other products brought added competition for northbound barge space.

The salt industry produced 20 million tons of road de-icing product last season, up from 10 million tons the year before, Hanneman said. There are complications with increasing production 100 percent, such as finding enough experienced salt miners, he said.

All of it created supply problems for the small cities waiting behind the bigger customers.

De Soto city street superintendent Ron Creason said initial inquiries weren’t encouraging.

“They don’t have any,” he said of the city’s suppliers. “The big highway departments have just swallowed it up. It just isn’t available. They wouldn’t even quote me a price. So I don’t know what it would cost this year.”

Learning that other smaller area cities were in the same boat, De Soto City Administrator Pat Guilfoyle suggested they band together in the hope that their collective buying power would better attract suppliers’ attention.