Engineers brief public and business owners; one-way conversion appears unlikely

By Josh Davis, Associate Editor

(Feb. 15, 2018) A larger-than-expected crowd came away mostly satisfied with plans for waterline, road and sidewalk improvements on Gay Street at a meeting on the project last Wednesday night in Berlin.

Josh Taylor, a senior engineer with Davis, Bowen & Friedel Inc., said plans were to replace the old, two-inch water lines with new, six-inch piping. The project is largely necessitated by a new, mixed-use development on Gay Street set to have shops on the ground floor and apartments on the upper floors.

Taylor said flow was constricted on the old lines, probably only an inch wide now because of rust, and new lines would improve capacity, water flow, quality and pressure.

While planning for the project, Taylor said engineers realized the road was also not in good shape. He said a new overlay would improve the surface of the road and make it stronger and longer lasting.

With new commercial businesses coming, planners also saw the need for new sidewalks, with ramps and other accessibility improvements, Taylor said.

With several business owners present, including representatives from The Globe, Salon Sixteen and Wainwright’s Tire Center, Taylor said contractors would do their best to work around business hours when scheduling road closures and water outages.

“We always try to coordinate with the business owners, especially the ones that you have to close when the water is off,” Public Works and Water Resources Director Jane Kreiter said. “We’ll be in close communication … during that time.

“Typically [water outages] are two-to-three hours,” she added. “Of course, there’s always the exception.”

Kreiter said the project could not be postponed until after the busy summer season, because the owner of the new building, Patrick Vorsteg, needs water service for the project to come online. However, it’s possible work finishes in time for the start of summer.

“We could probably get construction started in two or three months,” Taylor said. “We could expedite our permit approvals [and] the town could set the advertising period [sooner].”

Assuming ideal conditions, he said permitting could finish this month, with construction bids awarded in April and construction starting by the middle of May. The project could finish in June.

One of the items up for discussion, converting Gay Street into a one-way road, did not go far. Taylor said the current design is for a two-way street and engineers would instead look at maximizing space on the roadway, potentially gaining a few feet by pushing it to the edge of existing telephone lines.

Town Administrator Laura Allen said last Thursday that turnout during the meeting was “substantially more than [she] had expected.”

“It’s always great when folks come to a meeting and can hear the plan and give their feedback firsthand, as opposed to hearing it second and third or through the grapevine,” she said. “From our perspective, [the plan] is pretty straightforward, but we understand when it comes to turning off water, that can have a significant impact on business owners and residents.”

Allen reiterated contractors would work with residents and business owners and had a good track record of doing so.

“I think, overall, they did seem pleased,” she said. “There was some discussion about expanding the pavement and we’re going to take a look at that.”

She said the town was not proposing converting the street to one way, adding, “I didn’t pick up a lot of interest, but I did hear some side conversations afterward.”

“It may come back. If there’s a group of people that are interested in making the street one way and they really want to have a discussion about it, I think the best thing for them to do is just to come talk to me or talk to the police chief, because we would have to have a traffic analysis done,” Allen said.

“The challenge with any kind of change like that is, it’s not just localized on that street – it affects traffic and traffic flow on a wider area, so we’d have to be thoughtful about how we go about it,” she added.