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Avoiding a Replay

Those at a Sept. 26 public hearing predictably heard Nut Plains Road residents almost unanimously oppose proposed path design efforts while those in several adjacent subdivisions uniformly urged selectmen to proceed with design and build the facility. Responses mirrored those of a 2016 hearing relative to an upper State Street multiuser path (that’s what is was called then) now incorporated into the longer, circa two-mile pedestrian connection between the I-95 State Street overpass and North Madison Road. Selectmen ostensibly held the public hearing at an early point to gauge whether to expend local and/or federal-aid design funds on the pedestrian project—avoiding a replay of the recent Route 1 multiuser path debacle just as the project was scheduled for advertising.

Curiously, a proposed six-foot-wide concrete walking surface was alternately termed a sidewalk, a path, and a multiuser path—perhaps because four years ago Town Engineer Jim Portley told selectmen that calling a sidewalk a “multi-use path” or a “path” was just a tricky way to get around Town Charter sidewalk snow/ice clearing requirements. One speaker who had obviously done her homework asked how a six foot wide piece of concrete qualified as a multi-use path given state and federal guidelines that range from 10 to 12 feet. Neither Portley nor state representatives in the room (consultants) responded.

In general, Nut Plains Road residents understandably rejected Portley’s plea for a kumbaya, let’s-design-it-together experience, hoping that selectmen would shoot the project and put it out of its misery. Unfortunately, one Sept. 26 speaker may have correctly surmised that this set of selectmen is predisposed to design and build a two-mile long concrete sidewalk between I-95 and North Madison Road along what another speaker termed Guilford’s last country road south of Route 80—impacts be damned.

Herbert Burstein

Guilford