Paris unveils 11-year plan to fix roads

PARIS — The first draft of a massive $4.5 million road improvement plan for the town of Paris was released by Town Manager Phil Tarr on Monday evening.

The plan maps out 11 year's worth of road projects, at a cost of approximately $410,000 per year.

Last year, many members of the public rejected a road plan that would have seen a $4 million loan used to patch up many of the town's worst roadways over one or two years. Many felt that the plan was not well-thought-out enough to justify the bond.

Town leaders went back to the drawing board, and have released the draft, which lays out the order in which roads will be addressed.

The plan will be reviewed by the Paris Road Committee, which was formed especially for the purpose, the Paris Budget Committee, and the Board of Selectmen before it is passed along to voters.

Town leaders hope that the plan will be approved by voters during the annual town meeting in June.

In the first year of the plan, improvements will be made to about six miles of roadways, made up of sections of Elm Hill Road, Paris Hill Road, Brett Hill Road, Twitchell Road, Lincoln Street, Cobble Hill, and Alpine Street.

In 2013, additional work would be done on some of those roadways, and work would begin on Hall Pond Road, Ryerson Hill Road, Parsons Road and Walcott Street.

The work on Elm Hill Road, for example, will take place over a five-year period, with the final step being a layer of top coat that will add years of life to the road. In the plan floated last fall, no allowances were made for top coat paving.

In the early years, projected costs are higher, with a peak of $532,000 in 2014. The costs are projected to tail off in the later years of the plan, as major reconstruction projects give way to more ditching and sidewalk projects.

"The money needed to invest in capital road projects will decline over time and eventually level off," wrote Tarr in a plan summary. "As this approach to road capital improvement tapers off, a more routine approach to road maintenance emerges."

In 2021, costs are projected at $386,000, and in 2022, the final year of the plan, costs bottom out at about $326,000.

On February 2, the road committee met for the first time, and asked for several pieces of information related to the plan, including the projected impact on the mil rate.

The plan was designed to be implemented without the town borrowing money.

"If the town can appropriate what it has budgeted in the past, plus the amount of money a hypothetical bond payment would be, the amount available would be $500,000 annually. ... Thousands of dollars of bond interest will be saved," wrote Tarr.

On Monday, Selectman Ted Kurtz said that, while the plan was well-done, he would like to see information that demonstrated that the approach would save money over borrowing in the long run.

"It may be that we could save a ton of money by borrowing and watching the cost of paving go up over the next 11 years," he said.

Tarr said that the pace of inflation, which is not accounted for in the plan, is likely to match that of increases in paving costs.

In addition, he said that the 11-year schedule allows the town road crew to do a good deal of the work at a reduced cost, which wouldn't be the case if the town tried to borrow money to do the work more quickly.

Kurtz also said that he would like to see a policy that established a minimum distance between the road and the underlying water table, which freezes and significantly contributes to road damage.

In addition, he said that he would like there to be a more aggressive approach to ditching on the sides of the roads, which he admitted "would not be popular with some landowners," but which he suggested would extend the life of the road system.

All of the cost projections are based on 2011 construction costs, with no allowances made for inflation.

Selectwoman Jean Smart said that she had a lot of faith in the ability of the road committee to make a good final recommendation on the plan.

"We are so lucky to have the caliber of people on the committee," she said. "I believe their final advice will be well thought-out."

Tarr developed the plan with Highway Foreman Dan Nowell and Rob Prue, an engineer from Pine Tree Engineering.

The plan is expected to come before the Board of Selectmen for a possible recommendation sometime this spring.