Almost a perfect town

(Except for our roads)

To the Editor;

I am proud to live in a place where so many investments are being made to keep our community up to date. A glance at the schools, the hospital, well kept homes and the many downtown improvements gives the visitor an impression that this is a community that is willing to invest in the future. Any major business considering locating here would be impressed with the investments we have in our water and sewer systems. Times may be tough but this town is going to thrive and prosper.

The one area that we need to work on is the roads. Who would ever want to live in a town where all of the roads look like the supposedly paved parts of Grove Street or Spring Street behind the Bear’s Den? Well that’s what almost all of our town roads will look like in just a few years if we don’t commit now to spend some money to keep them in decent repairs.

At the Budget Review Committee’s request, the town had a professional road engineering firm, Gorrill Palmer do an in-depth study of our 34 miles of paved roads. You can find the complete study on the town’s website (search for “Gorrill”).

The whole report is interesting reading, but here are the major points:

Takeaway number 1: If you don’t do regular, relatively inexpensive, maintenance on a road (e.g. $10,000-$20,000 per mile every few years), pretty soon the road is ruined and you need to spend a ton of money (e.g. $200,000 per mile) to rebuild the road. There is a “Cliff” — if you haven’t kept the road up, it falls off the cliff and the only choice is to rebuild the road (or, I suppose, turn it into gravel — but who would want to move here then?).

Takeaway number 2: We have a lot of roads that are dangerously close to “falling off the cliff.” If we don’t start spending money now to keep these roads in decent repair, we will lose them. Instead of $20,000 per mile for maintenance, we’ll need to spend $200,000 per mile to rebuild them (or turn them into gravel.). For a relatively modest investment we can keep most of these “at risk” roads from falling off the cliff.

Takeaway number 3: If we don’t do this now, in five years, we will be spending more than double to keep any semblance of decent roads in our town. I would be ashamed to foist this problem off on our children?

Takeaway number 4: To keep decent roads, we have to vote on June 14th “Yes” on articles 6 and 7 for road work. Yes, it will increase our taxes, but better to face up to this now than to make our kids do it five years from now ‚Ä“ or, make this a town that nobody will want to live in.

Take a look at the Gorrill report, it lists improvements for almost every street in town. Find your street and know that help is on the way — if you vote “Yes” on articles 6 and 7.

Chris Maas
Dover-Foxcroft