by FRAN RYAN
Daily Hampshire Gazette
WORTHINGTON — Residents at a special Town Meeting on Tuesday will be asked to spend $32,000 for a temporary bridge until the Sam Hill Road bridge is permanently repaired. The request made by a resident is not supported by town officials.
The meeting will start at 7 p.m. in the Town Hall at 160 Huntington Road.
Select Board member Evan Johnson said the bridge on Sam Hill Road which spans the Watts Brook, has been closed for just over a year due to its poor structural integrity including “problems with beams and deteriorating abutments.”
Residents and town officials disagree over the best solution.
Upset about the year-long closing of the bridge, Tom Spiro of Owl Ridge Road submitted the warrant article that will be considered Tuesday, asking that $32,000 be used for the rental and installation of a temporary bridge.
“My idea was for a modular temporary bridge that could be installed and removed quickly and simply,” Spiro said. “It wasn’t something that would cost a lot of money to install.”
The article stipulates that the rental would be “for the period of November 1, 2015 through April 30, 2016 and will be reconsidered at Annual Town Meeting each year for the same date range, until such time that permanent repair, re-construction or similar supplement of this bridge can be made.”
Town officials say that with engineering and installation costs, $32,000 is an unrealistically low number. They made that assessment after consulting with Mabey Inc. of Sutton, a company that sells and rents prefabricated temporary bridges, as well as Mark DeVylder, district bridge engineer for the Massachusetts Department of Transportation.
“Our understanding is that the best-case scenario for a temporary bridge is that it would more likely cost between $65,000 to $70,000,” said Peggy O’Neal, secretary of the Select Board.
Neither the Select Board nor the Finance Committee support the article, and town officials instead hope to get state money to repair the bridge from a MassWorks grant program.
According to O’Neal, the town tried to get a $790,000 MassWorks infrastructure grant just before the bridge closed.
“We had a two-week window of opportunity to submit the grant and our bridge was closed in that second week,” O’Neal said. “We scrambled like crazy, but couldn’t manage it.”
O’Neal said that the MassWorks grant has been submitted for this year and the town hopes to find out in October if it will receive the money. If not, it would be three years before the town could apply again.
“It’s pretty competitive, but our hope is that we will get the grant and the project will be shovel ready by spring,” O’Neal said.
Still, that would mean another winter of residents having to use the detour from Starkweather Road off Huntington Road (Route 112) to West Street, a narrow unpaved road that is rutted and muddy in the spring and further narrowed by snow accumulation in the winter.
“The problem is that West Street is not designed to hold additional traffic. It is a narrow dirt road and during the winter with the snow it is impossible for cars to pass each other,” said Spiro, who lives behind the bridge off West Street.
Spiro said that he had submitted a petition for the warrant article to the Select Board in February, after the Mabey company and Department of Transportation had indicated to him that “there would be no need to ‘re-engineer’ this project, and that the only costs incurred would be for rental and installation.”
“I am at a loss as to why there is such a discrepancy,” Spiro said in an Aug. 14 letter to Alexander Bardow, director of bridges and structures with the state Department of Transportation.
“I have talked to many people, some in the DOT itself, who have said that this installation is ‘very common’ and should be just a quick review of standard plans,” Spiro wrote.
O’Neal said that DeVylder will be available at the special Town Meeting to answer questions from residents and town officials.
According to Spiro, there are 200 signatures on the petition from Worthington residents who want a temporary bridge installed before winter.
“I can’t blame the town since Mass DOT is not giving us any concrete answers on the engineering costs, they can’t move forward. They can’t approve the $32,000 for a temporary bridge if there will be excessive charges,” Spiro said.
O’Neal said that the town is especially concerned about spending money on one temporary bridge, when other bridges in town are also in serious disrepair.
One such bridge is on Kinnebrook Road, which is under threat of closing if emergency repairs cannot be completed by Oct. 15.
“We actually have five different bridges in town that need attention,” O’Neal said. They are on Adams Road, River Road, Goss Hill Road and Ireland Street as well as the one on Kinnebrook.
“Bridges are very pricey and it is daunting for a small town,” O’Neal said.
Spiro said that if the article is turned down, he hopes the money that was suggested for rental of the bridge could be put toward upgrading West Street.
