Steamboat Springs is currently down one seasonal snowplow driver out of 20 positions. Routt County is fully staffed with 32 snow pushers.

Meanwhile, the Colorado Department of Transportation has just one out of six positions in its Steamboat Springs garage full.

In a meeting with Routt County commissioners on Tuesday, officials from Routt County, Oak Creek, Yampa and Steamboat commended local CDOT personnel for keeping up with plowing so far this season, especially since there are so few of them.

“Everything has been pretty normal,” said Jon Snyder, Steamboat’s public works director. “We have not seen the drop-off that we were all fearing we would see when we heard how short they were on operators.”

Randy McIntosh, maintenance superintendent in CDOT’s Section Six, said that’s because he has been moving plow drivers from nearby garages in Craig and Hayden to cover Steamboat when needed — part of an “all-hands-on-deck” approach that the agency detailed before the snow started flying.

This approach is also being used across the state, where one in five CDOT snowplow jobs remains vacant.

CDOT Director of Maintenance and Operations John Lorme presented a host of strategies the agency is taking to get staffing levels closer to what they should be. He even said he was hesitant to share the strategies with Routt County officials because they often compete for the same workers.

But Routt County Manager Jay Harrington had some bad news for Lorme, saying that apart from building workforce housing, the county has already done all the things Lorme shared.

“We’re all doing the same thing,” Harrington said. “We have changed more HR policies in the last 12 months than probably the last 12 years. … I can get things done in a month, which takes you 18 months, and as a result, our plows are fully staffed.”

The key difference is pay. Steamboat pays entry-level full time plow drivers just under $26 an hour, and that goes up by 3% on Jan. 1. Routt County starts its drivers at about $22 an hour, but almost all of them have been on the job for years and make significantly more than that.

CDOT’s posting for the position in Steamboat Springs advertises $19.31 an hour.

Jason Smith, CDOT’s Region Three director, said they also offer a $1,000-a-month housing stipend for the Steamboat job and similar stipends are spurring more applications in places like Aspen. Still, the stipend hasn’t filled positions vacant in Steamboat yet.

“I think that it’s a good short-term solution to be providing these housing stipends,” Corrigan said. “For you to address your longer-term issues, you need to be able to hire people and pay people that are going to be in the neighborhood and the community long-term, and a housing stipend probably isn’t the way to get there.”