Saratoga Lake's salt problem looks like others
Find out how another North Country county handles the issue.
You are reading a sneak peek version of the Dispatch: Daily News in the Spa City.
A study of salt in Saratoga Lake and its tributaries finds that the levels of salinity in some waterways are at levels toxic to aquatic life, and the culprit is believed to be too much road salt on the streets of some municipalities — including Saratoga Springs. The authors are urging local governments to cut back on the overuse of salt and take other measures to mitigate the problem, while at the same time asking the public to put pressure on their elected leaders.
A report commissioned by the Saratoga Lake Association and conducted by Skidmore College seniors has made the problem of salt in the waterways clear, proponents say.
“It’s a fine report, but it’s not surprising,” said Skidmore’s Kurt Smemo. A professor in the Environmental Studies and Sciences Department, Smemo led the study that relied on the work of senior students Peter Merz, Christopher Schuckers, Emma Lloyd and Katherine Grace.
“You put a lot of salt on the road, and you’ll get a lot of salt in your streams and your storm sewers,” Smemo said.
“The comprehensive study of watershed-scale salinity patterns found that road salt runoff — primarily from urban areas such as Saratoga Springs and Malta — is significantly elevating chloride concentrations in tributaries feeding Saratoga Lake,” a summary of the report release by the SLA says.
According to the document, the Saratoga Springs storm sewer outflow can exceed 4,000 parts per million (ppm) of chloride, and conductivity readings of more than 10,000 µS/cm, “indicating levels known to be toxic to aquatic life.”
This is far in excess of the typical range of 0-200 µS/cm (or up to up to 1000 µS/cm for major rivers), according to Atlas Scientific. Atlas Scientific, a company that produces water metering devices, explains, “Water that has a conductivity range of 1000-10,000 µS/cm indicates that it is saline.”
Smemo said this was just the first year of study; future years will consider how fast the salt goes from roadway to waterway, and how much winter rains or freeze-and-thaw patterns affect the runoff.
The study was commissioned by the SLA, which paid for 10 special sensors to take the measurements in various waterways throughout the Saratoga Lake watershed throughout the winter of 2024–2025.
“The chloride load is increasing,” said John Cashin, an SLA board member told the Dispatch.
First steps
When announcing the report, the group called on local leaders to make change. Cashin said that training snow plow drivers to learn simple measures to cut down their use of salt — perhaps to turn off the salt spreader while stopped at a traffic light, or to just keep the plow in the garage until it is truly needed, may help.
“Tributaries such as Spring Run and Geyser Creek—both flowing from the heart of Saratoga Springs and corresponding with the areas of highest road density—were identified as major contributors of salt pollution entering the lake,” the document says.
What worked in Warren County
By way of comparison, but by no means scientific, Warren County has lowered the salt tonnage from 4,600 tons in 2021 to 3,100 tons in 2025 — a change of $107,000 or a 29% decrease in spending on salt.
Unfortunately, the numbers from the same years aren’t available for Saratoga Springs — in order to compare the same winters with the same amount of winter precipitation — but without a unified reduction effort, Saratoga Springs purchased 4,370 tons in 2019; 1,742 in 2020; 1205 in 2021; and 3,305 tons in 2022.
The decreases for Warren County were no accident, said Kevin Hajos, the superintendent of Public Works for the county and former member of the Adirondack Road Salt Reduction Task Force, a state body charged to reduce the amount of salt that enters waterways. He said Warren County got its start with help from the Lake George Association.
He agreed with the general sentiment that the SLA’s Cashin and Skidmore’s Smemo expressed: Plows can spread less salt and still give car drivers the safety they need, he said.
“We have to get the ice off the roadways” for safety and that may require salt, Hajos said. “If it’s snow, it’s a different story.”
The county purchased “live edge plows” that get into the grooves of a roadway better. They also purchased brining equipment that lays a layer of salt brine on the roadway before the storm and stops ice from forming, and they trained drivers to set the plows at a lower spread of salt “per lane-mile” so less salt is on the roadway to begin with.
The SLA’s Cashin cited all of these ideas as possible fixes for Saratoga County’s municipalities, and Saratoga Springs Commissioner of Public Works Charles “Chuck” Marshall said the city will apply for a New York State Department of Environmental Conservation grant to fund installation of a salt spreader calibrator on the trucks.
In steps that match rather closely with steps taken by Warren County in recent years, the report asks municipalities to:
Implement best practices in salt application, including calibrating equipment and using brine pre-treatment.
Apply for DOT Grants for funding of road salt reduction initiatives.
Reduce overall salt use in sensitive watershed areas.
Increase public education around the environmental consequences of road salt.
Partner with SLA and other stakeholders to expand monitoring and promote coordinated watershed management.
Hajos said one idea that he and others on the road salt task force promoted was to increase the amount of money in the state’s CHIPS fund, the Consolidated Highway Improvement Program. A road in good shape is much easier to clear, and therefore needs less salt, than a broken, potholed or cracked roadway. He also suggested that municipalities look at the tree canopy over the road — a shaded roadway does not get the sunlight and therefore the heat to melt the ice naturally.
Public Input
Cashin is asking the public to pressure local leaders to take the threat to the ecosystem more seriously.
“We didn’t have sufficient science in the past,” he said, but now with this study, the group does. “We can’t afford to let it [road salt contamination] continue.”