Washington Making Push For Delayed Road Reconstruction
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Washington Mountain Road goes from Pittsfield into Dalton, Washington and Becket. |
PITTSFIELD, Mass. — The town of Washington has been waiting years for state or federal funding to repair Washington Mountain Road.
The road has not been completely resurfaced since the 1970s. In the 1990s, the town began the process for repairs and held a public hearing in 1998. The state Department of Transportation had identified state funds that could be used for it.
Then they waited.
And waited.
Now MassDOT says the pot of money they had hoped to eventually use for to repair the road is gone — sending the town back to the drawing board.
"It was on the TIP (Transportation Improvement Program) more than 20 years ago," Board of Selectmen Chairman Jim Huebner said on Tuesday after pitching the project to the Transportation Advisory Committee. That committee recommends to the Metropolitan Planning Commission, which sets the schedule for local road projects. "About a month ago, we were told that we were no longer eligible for the funding we have been waiting 20 years for."
Town officials are now calling their state representatives, MassDOT officials and planning organizations to get back on the list of projects but that may require the project to be broken into multiple sections and not happen until 2017.
The project was initially to resurface the entire road, which runs into Becket and Dalton as well, in two sections. The first phase would resurface from Kirchner Road to West Branch Road and then the rest could be completed after.
A section on Becket's side has been resurfaced but Washington has been using nearly all of its Chapter 90 funds each year to maintain its eight-mile stretch of the broken road. Washington officials are now hoping just for their stretch to receive funding.
"We're a town of 600 people, we can't re-pave eight miles of road," Selectman Michael Case said. "That's where we are spending all of our Chapter 90."
But at TAC, planning officials said the project is too large — leaving it no place to be penciled in for completion. With a full docket of projects to be funded, it wouldn't be until 2017 when the town could actually see any type of funding for only that portion of the road.
TAC members are expecting they'll have say on a total of $6.2 million in funding in 2017 but by then the project would cost about $9.8 million.
The TAC told town officials to go back to voters to see if they can break the project into north and south sections to allow two projects to fit.
The road is mostly used as a cut through — trimming some 20 minutes off of commute times — for residents driving to Pittsfield. Case called it "one of the most dangerous roads in the county."
The Washington Mountain Road project isn't the only one that has been bypassed in funding because of the size of the project. In Savoy, a $5.2 million project to reconstruct a portion of Route 116 is also not scheduled to receiving funding.
The TAC is hoping to find ways to fund those projects because in the current system, they'll never be done.
Tags: Chapter 90, paving, road project, transportation,
