Class 1 Town Highway in Putney?
Putney may take responsibility for Route 5 upkeep in village
By HOWARD WEISS-TISMAN, Reformer Staff
Thursday, January 31
PUTNEY — The town is taking a whole new look at the busiest road in town.
The Selectboard is exploring what it would mean for the town to take over maintenance of the one mile of Route 5 that runs through the center of the village.
The Vermont Agency of Transportation maintains state highways.
The news that Putney may become only the fourth town in Windham County to maintain a Class 1 highway comes as the Agency of Transportation announced that Putney won a $27,000 grant to fund an engineering study of its sidewalks.
The grant, which will reach $33,000 with matching funds and in-kind work, will allow the town tofind out what it will take to install about one mile of new sidewalk from Landmark College down to the Putney Co-op.
The town does not have to take over the state highway to complete the sidewalk project, but it might be easier, and the town would have more freedom to put in sidewalk bump outs and traffic calming devices if it did not have to run everything by the state.
“From our point of view, we might find it easier to design and build if we were responsible for the highway,” Putney Town Manager Chris Ryan said. “This
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is the kind of thing we would want to talk over with the state.”
Ryan stressed that the Selectboard was in the very early stages of investigating the idea and had a long way to go before moving forward.
The transportation grant, however, has put the sidewalk project on the fast track.
According to Ryan, the town is going to hire an engineering firm to do a detailed study of the existing sidewalks in town, and what it would cost to install a new walking path.
“It’s a lot of sidewalk, and the existing ones are shot,” Ryan said. “The idea is to get a real idea of what it will cost and identify the obstacles.”
After the engineering study is completed, the town will likely ask the state for help building the sidewalks. Ryan said the whole project will be in the “hundreds of thousands of dollars.”
If the town decides to take over Route 5, and if the state approves it, the town would receive $11,000 annually to help defray maintenance costs. The towns in Vermont receive far less for maintaining Class 2 and 3 roads.
And while the extra cash could help the town highway budget, Windham Regional Commission transportation planner Matt Mann said Putney residents should look at the whole picture before moving ahead with the state highway proposal.
Mann said state highways in Brattleboro, Bellows Falls and Readsboro have been turned over to those towns.
“If the town wants this corridor to look differently, or wants it to be a a certain way, it’s fine to explore,” said Mann. “It could be a good thing for the town if they want to do more with pedestrian and bicycle management. But there are a lot of variables.”