Select board chair Andy Cunningham discussed the plans at the May 24 select board meeting.
“We spoke with Mark Bannon and told him the more succinct direction that we want to go in,” Cunningham said. That includes removing the guardrails and existing pavement, reclaiming it, repacking it, and placing a geotextile road fabric underneath eight inches of gravel. The result, he said, would be raising the road by approximately one foot.
Cunningham said, “It is a larger number than we had first expected.” Select board members explained that the higher number is the result of not originally including the cost of guardrails and deeper digging and ditching.
On Town Meeting Day, voters unanimously approved Article 7 to fund the Sugarbush Access Road repaving project at a cost of $375,000. There wasn’t a single nay vote.
The project consists of paving an eight-tenths-of-a-mile section of road starting in the vicinity of Gold Hill Road and ending near Wheeler Brook.
One thing Bannon recommended, according to Cunningham, was allocating money in next year’s town paving budget to cover the cost of crack sealing to prevent water from infiltrating the new pavement.
Cunningham said, “Also this includes lines stripes and stone fill and ditches as needed. The only thing that we didn’t spec is the different size aggregate in the two lifts. Ray wants a larger aggregate in base and finer aggregate in the top.”
Warren Department of Public Works director Barry Simpson previously put out a request for proposals from three engineers and met with all three engineers at separate times on site including Mark Bannon, Don Marsh of Marsh Engineering, and Doug Newton who respectively declined Simpson’s request.
Select board member Bob Ackland said that approving the project is necessary to meet the standards in order to receive state funding, especially where erosion control is concerned.
The town plans to put the specs out to bid as soon as possible.
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