WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass. — Town Manager Jason Hoch was not looking forward to an inevitable paving project in the town's Village Business District.

 

It was time to start thinking about redoing Spring Street, a process that was sure to inconvenience residents and businesses alike.

 

This after a culvert installation project on Latham Street, at the bottom of Spring Street in 2017-18 and the rebuild of the municipal parking lot.

 

Then the town highway superintendent gave Hoch the solution he needed.

 

"All credit goes to Chris Lemoine," Hoch said on Thursday. "He sent me a note last week and said: This might be a totally off-the-wall idea, but should we think about repaving Spring Street now?

 

"I said, 'That's a great idea. There's no better time in terms of avoiding disruption.' "

 

Unfortunately, the local economy already is severely disrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic. Among many consequences is a loss of traffic on the normally busy commercial street.

 

So starting early this week, the town will have a contractor on site to mill Spring Street, one of three town roads (including Bank Street and portions of Latham) that have had their regular maintenance moved up to this month.

 

"Based on the lifespan from the last major rebuild, Spring Street is coming due in the next year or two," Hoch said. "I've been dreading even thinking about it.

 

"Everyone was breathing a sigh of relief because all the other work was finally done, and we were going to come in and upset the apple cart again."

 

There still is some commerce going on, even during the age of social distancing. And the town plans to provide short-term parking for meal pickup at Spring Street eateries during the road work.

 

But the opportunity to do the work during an unusually and unexpectedly slow spring season was too good to pass up.

 

Fortunately, Hoch had the funds available in the town coffers to slide the project into fiscal 2020, and he was able to book a contractor that the town regularly uses on road projects.

 

"We made sure they were comfortable following the expanded safety guidelines," he said, referring to the governor's municipal construction guidelines to prevent the spread of the novel coronavirus during the pandemic.

 

"It did give us a little bit of pause [to start a project during the pandemic], but the state has clearly set out guidelines for contractors and set out regulations they're holding contractors for [the Department of Transportation] to. We made sure anything we were going to do was going to follow that guidance."

 

The state is discouraging most construction outside of housing and infrastructure.

 

Hoch said there might be some additional cost for equipment, and someone will need to be dedicated on site to checking workers' temperatures each morning, but the road work is not a very labor-intensive operation.

 

"The timeline likely will be a little bit longer than a standard project," Hoch said. "The [contractor's] machine comes in and does the milling the first day. Our crew will come in and work on rebuilding any drainage structures that need it, raising any structures that need to be raised. That may take longer because we'll be putting our crew in and will need to follow the guidelines.

 

"The final paving is, again, a one-day operation."

 

Hoch said he was sensitive to having work done under the "essential services" umbrella but happy to have the ability to help workers get paid during the crisis.

 

He said it was unclear just how much the pandemic has affected the supply and demand of road crews. Some operations have opted to shutdown and are unavailable while others are still taking on work. He did not go so far as to say that the trades involved are desperate for the work, but he did say it will be harder for some public projects to go forward in an uncertain budget climate.

 

These days, he is dealing with a fair amount of budget uncertainty himself as he thinks about redoing the FY21 plan that previously cleared the town's Finance Committee en route to a planned May annual town meeting.

 

That town meeting -- and the town election -- likely will be postponed in a vote of the Select Board on Monday night. And Hoch has told the Finance Committee to stay tuned for another round of budget review after he is able to make better projections about a constantly evolving FY21 budget landscape.

 

"It's all on hold," he said. "There are so many questions I can't answer that it's not worth dwelling on a lot. We have indeterminate impact for lodging, meals and cannabis [revenue] and indeterminate impact for state aid. These are major pieces of revenue I can't nail down right now."

 

The silver lining in a cloudy budget picture? Williamstown's pre-COVID-19 forecast for FY21 was among the most favorable in years.

 

"The only thing that's reassuring to me is we had town and school budgets almost ready to cross the finish line in a condition that had no tax increase," Hoch said. "That's more reassuring than contemplating next year's budget knowing that just to break even [in Plan A], we needed a tax increase."

 

While Hoch tries to read the tea leaves of what looks to be the greatest economic crisis in nearly a century, the rest of his staff, like Lemoine, is looking at ways to stay productive during the pandemic.

 

"My colleagues are getting a jump on things that they would have said, 'I'd like to tackle this project when we have time,' " Hoch said. "There's a lot of back end stuff happening that way. Community Development is pulling some old databases they need to use to do research into a more usable format. Finance is moving ahead on a plan to look at the billing system and how we use online software to streamline things.

 

"We definitely are picking up some of the operational benefits that way."

 

Town hall staff have been working from home for weeks, and although they still are addressing residents' concerns by phone or email, the lack of foot traffic in their offices does help free up some time.

 

"Luckily, because we'd already committed to having these different cloud-based platforms, expanding those and intensifying the use of them was easier because the foundation was already there," Hoch said.

 

"That said, I don't care if I ever use Zoom again when this passes."