Summary Of The Public Road Meeting

[Ericka & Todd Pritsky]

On Monday December 12th some 40 residents of Fletcher gathered in the Town Offices to discuss the state of our roads. Opinions varied widely. Some wanted the newly ground roads to be paved as soon as possible. Some were concerned that the road base was not sufficient for the traffic, and that paving prematurely would waste money. Some worried that we were not designing and building the roads to deal with the heavy trucks that actually use the roads.

In the end, the best approach seems to be as follows:

1. Propose a Town budget with approximately a $250K increase for Class 2 summer maintenance
2. Come up with a specific plan for repaving during the summer of 2017
3. Ask the voters whether they wish to authorize a loan to do the repaving in 2017, using an Australian ballot
4. If the loan is authorized, then we will proceed to repave everything and use the $250K to service the loan debt
5. If the loan is not authorized, then we will use the $250K to improve the road bed and pave as much as seems prudent. We can always ask for a loan again if the situation changes

In the past, the Select Board has often had a strong opinion as to whether a particular course of action is best. For example, we strongly advocated building the new Town Office building. In the case of the 2017 loan and paving, the Select Board is likely to be more neutral. Either course of action (loan and full re-paving, or no loan and incremental paving) would be acceptable.

Submitted by the members of the Select Board present at the meeting:
Jon Bondy (Chair), N. Todd Pritsky, Terry Riggs, Jesse Wiens