LYNNFIELD — At the Nov. 13 Special Town Meeting, residents will be voting on a new road improvement program.
Article 6 calls for a $12,850,000 debt exclusion to pay the costs of the 10-year project. Town Administrator Rob Dolan said the debt exclusion will double the amount of money invested on roads.
Roads in New England are “incredibly difficult to maintain,” with many factors at play including dated infrastructure and harsh winter conditions, Dolan said in a recent Town Talk segment, adding much of the development in Lynnfield came in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s.
“We are now reaping a time when those roads begin to all fall apart at the same time,” Dolan said, adding that rising fuel and labor create real challenges. “You have all of those issues along with wear and tear that have created a crisis.”
DPW Director John Scenna said over the last decade, the amount of funds received from the state has been relatively level, but it wasn’t until 2017 that the town started to match the state’s Ch. 90 funding.
“We started to make some headway and progress in doing a larger road program but… that just isn’t enough,” Scenna said. “You definitely can’t do as much today as you could a decade ago. Coming out of COVID, the wage adjustments, the cost of material was higher, the cost of road repair per foot is definitely higher.”
Dolan outlined the money the town has spent on roads over the past seven years. The town’s contribution has been $3 million, or 41% of the total cost. Ch. 90 funds from the state have been $2.5 million (35%), other funds from state surplus totaled $1 million (14%), and special grants have totaled $750,000 (10%).
“We’ve almost seen a flip-flop of the funding, which is difficult,” Dolan said.
Scenna said the process of assessing road conditions is now almost exclusively computer generated by AI compared with traditional methods of manually counting potholes or measuring the widths of cracks.
An analysis of Lynnfield’s roads reveals a relatively equal amount of roads have been designated as poor (21.87 miles), fair (23.01 miles), or good (25.83 miles) with a total estimated cost to repair of $23.5 million. The lion’s share of repair costs lies with those deemed to be poor, ringing in at $17.3 million.
Scenna said compared to other similar communities, Lynnfield’s average road rating is “on the bottom edge of average.”
Scenna said in forecasting a budget for repairs, the model allocates 60-65% to poor roads, 30% to fair roads, and 10% to good roads, saying repairing only poor roads is not a viable option.
“That’s not enough. If you only do that, you’ll never catch up,” he said. “We have to take that group of fair roads and make sure they at least stay in that fair condition and they don’t further deteriorate to the point where they get into the poor category.”
Dolan said the current proposal before residents of $2 million per year over 10 years represents “a more robust investment.”
Under the proposal, the town will continue to spend approximately $415,000 in Ch. 90 funds and continue the town’s $300,000 capital investment. The requested debt exclusion would add another $1,285,000 per year with the added residential tax increase equal to about $258 per average assessed home over 10 years.
Scenna said if the article is approved, the town will be able to plan the next improvements/repairs over the winter.
“We could tell our contractors this is what we’re doing in the spring and this is what we are doing in the summer and then the Ch. 90 money comes in July and that’s the fall program,” Scenna said. “We could do triple what we are doing over the course of those three segments.”
Scenna said one of the factors that goes into deciding which roads to repair involves the utilities that have underground networks.
“Their work also defines some of what we do. They may want to work where we’re going. We may want to work where they’re going. Or they may want to go somewhere where we’re not going to be.” Scenna said. “When it comes to disruptions and traffic, it’s not just our work, it’s their work.”
Scenna said the department begins to plan the year’s road work in January, following which it notifies National Grid and the two water districts of where it will be working.
“You want to give them a block of streets for one year or two years of work,” Scenna said. “Sometimes they go to work before us and sometimes they may not need to do any work. Sometimes they may say they want to do work there but not until the fall, so that pushes that street into another year.
“This would also be a very attractive town for bidders to bid on which would give us more stability than working with just one contractor,” he said.
Scenna said the town currently bids with North Reading and Middleton and “with a program like this and the continuity of investment over a decade that could change where we could bid on our own in January.”
