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07/11/2017 03:15 PMAt a recent Board of Selectmen (BOS) meeting, board members authorized the town to move forward and apply for a Transit-Oriented Development Grant to help with a proposed development on Bradley Road. As the town moves forward with the application, progress on last year’s transit-oriented grant project to rehab the Tuxis Walkway is still a work in progress.
In June 2016, the town received a $400,000 grant from the state’s Responsible Growth and Transit-Oriented Development Grant Program to make structural and aesthetic improvements to the Tuxis Walkway. The walkway is a boardwalk-style pedestrian pathway that stretches between Bradley Road adjacent to the Webster Bank lot at the north and the Boston Post Road between the firehouse and Cumberland Farms on the south, wrapping around the western edge of Tuxis Pond. It is the primary pedestrian link between the train station and Madison’s center.
A year after the first grant was awarded, the town is looking to apply for the same grant for a different project while still in the design phase for the Tuxis Walkway. Planning & Economic Development Director Dave Anderson said this grant program is designed to encourage intensity of development near transit hubs such as the train or bus station. Towns can be awarded up to $2 million for a specific project in a given year.
“The grant specifically encourages partnerships between private developers and municipalities,” he said. “There is a project that has been in the conceptual stages for three years which has kind of formed into a 36-unit apartment building next to the Hearth at Tuxis Pond. Our Plan of Conservation and Development encourages higher density housing in our downtown, so we thought it would be appropriate to try to see if we could take advantage of this grant opportunity and secure some funding for installation of the septic system to help that project move along.”
The town is asking for $615,000 for the project and an additional $200,000 for pedestrian infrastructure improvements along Bradley Road.
“If we can get that sidewalk network complete, I think it will have a really positive impact on the downtown,” he said.
While Anderson said it is likely to be a few months before the town hears back on the grant, he said he’s not worried about last year’s grant for the Tuxis Walkway expiring.
“I didn’t see a deadline when I read through the grant materials, so I don’t believe we’re in any danger of losing the funding,” he said. “It’s my understanding that Mike [Ott, the former town engineer] is continuing to work on the project and is still in the design phase, working out what improvements we can make with the funding we’ve been allocated.”
First Selectman Tom Banisch confirmed that Ott had completed some preliminary designs and had gotten quotes on some project elements, but said the major cause for the delay came from the state.
“There was an assignment by OPM [Office of Policy Management] of the grant to DOT [Department of Transportation] and in the process there was some kind of grappling between DOT and OPM because OPM wanted certain rules to be followed and DOT said, ‘We do it differently,’ and so we had to wait for all of that stuff to get squared away,” he said. “That finally was sorted and I think that by late spring we got word that we can start spending money that would be reimbursable, but we hadn’t done anything yet and in all honestly with Mike leaving it is going to be a little bit confusing moving forward.”
Ott resigned in June after more than a decade of service in Madison.
However now that the red tape has been cleared, Banisch said he is hoping to see progress soon as the project itself is fairly straightforward.
“We are looking at replacing all of the decking and the railing and we have numbers for that and then whatever structural work...that needs to be fixed,” he said. “What we want to do and what might require a little more planning is we want to tie it in with the sidewalk so the entrance from downtown is the same brick as the sidewalks that we used downtown. That is probably the third part that we need to pull together that we haven’t done yet, but I think it is a fairly simple thing that we just need to come up with a design.”