At the Nov. 13 Town Meeting, residents will be voting on three major items; the MBTA Zoning bylaw, the library renovation project and the town’s pavement improvement program.
Article 6 calls for a $12,850,000 debt exclusion to pay the costs of the cost of the 10-year roadway program. Town Administrator Rob Dolan said that the debt exclusion will double the amount of money invested in roads.
Roads in New England are “incredibly difficult to maintain,” Dolan said. He said many factors are at play including dated infrastructure and harsh winter conditions.
Dolan said the Select Board has asked for a plan to increase the quality of the town’s roads and also create a long-term maintenance strategy. He noted that 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.”
Dolan said that until 2017, Lynnfield relied 100% on Ch. 90 appropriations for road improvements.
DPW Director John Scenna said that 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 that 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. Scenna said the process is “very consistent” from community to community.
An analysis of Lynnfield’s roads reveals that a relatively equal amount of roads have been deemed to be 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. The good road group includes Walnut Street, which was paved in April, Perry Avenue and Todd Lane, while Bryant Street, Heritage Lane and Thistle Lane fall into the fair group. Among the poorest roads in town are Archer Lane, Currie Circle and Cortland Lane.
Scenna said when compared to other similar communities, Lynnfield’s average pavement rating is “on the bottom edge of average.”
“No one would ever come to Lynnfield and say ‘these are the best roads I’ve ever seen,’ but at the same time, although we are average, we are trying to deal with the upcoming crisis of the next decade,” Dolan said.
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 that 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.”
Scenna explained that using Ch. 90 money ($415,000) alone would result in a significant dip in the town’s rating score over the next 10 years.
“We don’t catch up, we don’t improve as a community,” Scenna added.
Dolan said the current proposal before residents of $2 million per year over 10 years represents “a more robust investment.”
“That takes us to an overall roadway rating of just over 76,” Scenna said. “If we can invest $2 million over the next 10 years we go from the bottom of the range to the top. We, as a department, feel that $2 million is the right expenditure.”
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 the 10-year period.
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 that the town currently bids with North Reading and Middleton and that “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.”
