The bond is back in Amherst

Thursday, March 4, 2010

Staff photo by Don Himsel Condition of the road on parts of Boston Post Road and Mont Vernon Road.

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Staff photo by Don Himsel Condition of the road on parts of Boston Post Road and Mont Vernon Road.

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Staff photo by Don Himsel Condition of the road on parts of Boston Post Road and Mont Vernon Road.

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Staff photo by Don Himsel Condition of the road on parts of Boston Post Road and Mont Vernon Road.

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Staff photo by Don Himsel Condition of the road on parts of Boston Post Road and Mont Vernon Road.

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Staff photo by Don Himsel John Haithcock, left, and Matt Currier talk about the future of Adros Energy no that the company has moved into new space in Amherst from Nashua. Adros is a geothermal, solar and wind energy company.

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Staff photo by Kathy Cleveland Roughly two dozen houses on Tarn Road on the border of Mont Vernon and Lyndeborough were evacuated overnight Friday after this Suburban Propane truck rolled into an ice-covered pond while trying to get up a slick hill to make a delivery. No one was injuried, but it took all night for the propane to leak out of the truck, beforethe truck could be towed away and residents return. Firefighters from a half-dozen towns were called, partly because so many water tankers were needed to keep hosing down the propane "mist" as a safety feature.

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Courtesy photo An aerial view of the 57-acre Brewster property, the former home of the Souhegan Soccer Farm, shows the parcel's rough boundaries. It lies north of Stearns Road, which runs left to right at the bottom of the photo; the road at center is the farm's dirt access road. The town recreation commission is eyeing the property for future recreation fields.

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Staff photo by Don Himsel Condition of the road on parts of Boston Post Road and Mont Vernon Road.

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2010 Amherst Town Meeting
To see continuing coverage of town meeting issues in Amherst, click here.

AMHERST – Of the two dozen or so articles on this year’s town warrant, none is as visible – and indeed, palpable – to residents and their vehicles as Article 22, the Road Reconstruction Bond.

The bond, which requires a three-fifths majority, or at least 60 percent of the vote to pass, asks voters to approve $15 million for a several-year road project involving roughly 23 miles of town roads that have been identified as most in need of repair or reconstruction.

Should the bond pass, the town could spend no more than $4 million a year, according to its wording. It would raise property tax bills roughly 23 cents per thousand of valuation for the first year.

“This is the (article) that affects the greatest number of people, both (residents) and those from out of town who use our roads,” town administrator Gary MacGuire said last week. If the bond doesn’t pass, he said, “we won’t be able to do (the work) right; we’ll only be able to Band-Aid the most unsafe spots on an emergency basis.”

Town public works director Bruce Berry said the importance in being given the green light to start the project lies not only in the immediate need to fix poor roads, but also so crews can begin tending to good roads so they don’t deteriorate into bad roads and start the cycle all over.

“We’ve been underfunded for some time for roads,” Berry said, adding that a report compiled by the Road Funding Analysis Committee after its formation two years ago identified problems “that we didn’t have enough money to do anything about.”

“I think everyone agrees that lots of roads are in tough shape,” he added. “But every (voter) has to figure out if they want to invest in them now. I’ll say this; the problem isn’t going to go away.”

Last year, voters defeated a road bond that asked for $6 million; selectmen had divided the $15 million three ways, requesting $6 million the first year and asking for slightly lower amounts the ensuing two years.

At Deliberative Session earlier this month, several residents questioned the town’s decision to ask for an amount as substantial as $15 million, even though it’s to be spread over several years, in light of the fact that voters rejected last year’s $6 million request.

Resident Mark Vincent, for instance, proposed an amendment at the session (it didn’t pass) to change $15 million to $4 million, suggesting that the town revert to the year-by-year approach. “Nobody disagrees that a lot of roads need work,” he said. “The $4 million would allow the project to get started, and after a year, we (residents) could see what we got for our money.”

Selectman Tom Grella said it would be more economical, and productive, to undertake the project on a long-term basis rather than continue making what amount to stopgap emergency repairs.

“We’d start with the worst roads, the ones that require the most work, so we’re estimating that we’d complete just two, maybe three miles the first year,” he said.

Grella told the roughly 150 residents in attendance that the roads have deteriorated, in large part, because water, whether rain or ice and snow melt, isn’t running off and draining properly. “That’s why you see all those frost heaves and dips and potholes,” he said.

MacGuire called the $4 million a year allotment “a manageable amount. We certainly couldn’t (request) the entire $15 million at once, the town would be one big detour,” he said. “It would be like our own Big Dig.”

Bill Overholt, chairman of the Town Road Commission and a member of the Road Funding Analysis Committee, said officials agreed that presenting one inclusive article is the best approach.

“It’s a lot clearer to say, ‘we’re asking for a total of $15 million over five years, and we won’t spend more than $4 million in any year,’” he said.

In all, the town maintains 122 miles of roadways. Of the roughly 23 miles being targeted for work, the largest stretches are on Mack Hill Road (1.7 miles), Spring Road (1.6 miles), Boston Post Road (1.5 miles) and Pond Parish Road (1.2 miles).

Between one-half and one mile of work would be done on Walnut Hill, Lyndeborough, Old Nashua, Pine, Nichols, Stearns, Cricket Corner, Christian Hill, Thornton’s Ferry I and Baboosic Lake roads, and on Columbia and Howe drives, Amherst Street, Standish Way and Pulpit Run.

Historically, Overholt said, officials gradually began paving town roadways as the popularity of the automobile increased and horse-drawn carriages and sleds faded into the history books. The bulk of roads got their first paving in the 1930s and ’40s, when crews did what Overholt calls “perfectly proper for the times” – they simply smoothed the dirt road and put down a couple of inches of asphalt.

That worked fine for a while, Overholt said. “Back then, Amherst was, after all, a small town of only 2,000 or so people, and most traffic was local,” he said, estimating that Boston Post Road saw a mere 50 to 100 cars a day.

Today, Overholt said, the road, one of the town’s main arteries, handles roughly 7,000 vehicles on an average day. “If someone had predicted that Boston Post Road would someday carry 7,000 (vehicles) per day, he would have been laughed out of town,” Overholt wrote in a letter to residents urging the road bond’s passage.

A fact sheet Overholt provided states that the cost for reclaiming a road (repairing the top half to two-thirds of the road bed) runs between $250,000 and $400,000 a mile, while the cost for a full-scale rebuilding can be as high as $800,000 a mile.

“The whole idea of this project is to do the work right so we won’t have to go back and rebuild these roads again in two or three years,” he said.

Dean Shalhoup can be reached at 673-3100, ext. 31, or dshalhoup@nashuatelegraph.com.