HARTLAND — The town Selectboard this week accepted a state grant of $269,000 that will go toward sidewalk work for the planned reconstruction of the Hartland Three Corners intersection.
Town Manager Dave Ormiston said the grant, from the state Agency of Transportation’s pedestrian and bike program, requires a 20% match, or about $67,000, from the town for a total grant of $336,000.
Ormiston said the sidewalk improvements were more than half of the initial $450,000 estimated cost of reconstruction, which roughly doubled last year after several residents asked the Selectboard to design the project with the utility lines buried to avoid leaving unsightly wires and a pole in a planned green space.
The cost estimate to bury the utilities is about $500,000, and the additional expense would mean the town would have to finance part of the work, which has been on the drawing board since 2014.
In late 2018, the Selectboard decided it would ask for approval from voters on whether they wanted to spend more to bury the lines. Since then, Ormiston said town officials agreed to seek estimates for leaving the power lines above ground along the eastern side of Route 5 and burying only lines that cross the intersection, such as cable, in hopes it would lower the cost. The alternative design has been engineered, and the town is now awaiting cost estimates from telecommunications companies.
Once all of the estimates are obtained, Ormiston said town officials would develop borrowing options and tax rate impacts before going to voters either at a special Town Meeting or at the annual meeting in March.
The configuration of the new intersection would create a four-way stop with Route 5, Route 12 and Quechee Road and eliminate a short spur that takes motorists north and south on Route 5.
Ormiston said one of the major reasons to rebuild the intersection was to make it more pedestrian-friendly, and sidewalk upgrades will make walking from Damon Hall, the library, the post office and other places safer.
“It will allow for crossing at each of the roads, and getting from one side of the village to the other becomes easier,” Ormiston said.
Also this week, the Selectboard gave permission to the 11-town Greater Upper Valley Solid Waste Management District to proceed with plans to construct a 60-by-60-foot building for a transfer station that will accept food waste, commonly called organics, which will be banned from Vermont landfills under a new state law scheduled to take effect next July.
Tom Kennedy, district manager of the waste management district and executive director of the Southern Windsor County Regional Planning Commission, said the estimated $500,000 cost for the building will be 40% covered by a grant from the Department of Environmental Conservation’s Solid Waste Division. The building would be constructed on land owned by the district between the Connecticut River and Interstate 91 and serve as a transfer station for organic waste.
Packaged and unpackaged food waste from grocery stores, institutions and haulers would be dumped on the concrete floor, then loaded into large trucks for transport to an anaerobic digester in Exeter, Maine, that would turn the waste into methane to produce electricity, Kennedy said.
The Exeter facility has what Kennedy described as a “depackaging” machine that is able to separate food waste from material such as small pieces of plastic.
He estimates when the transfer station is fully operational it will handle about 25,000 tons of material a year.
The solid waste district is working to obtain permits, and Kennedy hopes the short construction period can take place this fall.
The building will be leased to Grow Compost of Waterbury, Vt.
Patrick O’Grady can be reached at pogclmt@gmail.com.
