Town, Residents Concerned About Forest Service Plan to Use Williamstown Road

WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass. — A timber manager with the U.S. Forest Service told the Select Board on Monday that his office was willing to work with the town to address concerns raised by residents over a plan to haul timber out of the Green Mountain National Forest across the state line in Vermont.

 

An overflow crowd of residents from both Williamstown and Pownal, Vt., attended Monday's meeting at Town Hall, where Stacy Stratton and other officials from the Forest Service laid out plans to cut and remove 1 million board feet of wood — about 2,000 cords — from the woodland just north of town.

 

The sticking point is how officials expect that wood to be removed from the forest: down White Oaks Road, a narrow, twisting residential street that town's director of public works says is ill-suited for the operation.

 

DPW Director Craig Clough was joined at the microphone Monday by nearly a dozen residents of Williamstown and Pownal to question elements of what the Forest Service is calling the "South of Route 9 Integrated Resource Project."

 

Most of those concerns centered on White Oaks Road.

 

Stratton told the board that somewhere in the neighborhood of 200 log truck trips will be required to remove the wood that the service plans to remove from the forest, but that number does not include all the heavy equipment that will need to be taken to the cutting site or the daily traffic from loggers traveling to and from the site.

 

The project itself could take anywhere from one to five years, Stratton said. That number won't be known until the Forest Service puts the job out to bid.