SUNDERLAND – Two southern Franklin County towns have learned they will receive a combined nearly $172,000 from the state for infrastructure work.
The Baker-Polito administration announced Sunderland will get $71,438 for improvements to Americans with Disabilities Act requirements and construction of a manhole on School Street, while Leverett will benefit from $100,000 for a new water line connecting to a public water source for five houses downhill from the closed and capped Leverett landfill. The money is part of almost $5 million in awards to 31 Massachusetts communities through two new grant programs under the Housing Choice Initiative, a comprehensive proposal to create 135,000 new housing units by 2025.
Sunderland Town Administrator Sherry Patch said her town’s ADA improvements will be part of ongoing work. The project will implement a portion of the town’s Complete Streets Prioritization Plan and support new residential development near School Street, which provides pedestrian, bicycle and automobile access between the proposed 33-unit senior affordable housing and the town center.
“Complete Streets doesn’t give you design money – it gives you construction money,” she explained.
Patch said the work will create ADA-compliant sidewalks that improve access to the senior housing project, the public library, town office building and the Sunderland Riverside Park project, for which bids are expected this week. She said she hopes design work will be finished by roughly June 30, 2019.
“It’s exiting to see how all these things are coming together,” she said. “There are a lot of good things going on in Sunderland right now.”
Leverett Town Administrator Marjorie McGinnis said she got her town’s award letter from the state on Monday. Establishing the new public water line is the first step toward providing a permanent solution to the detection of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) and other contaminants in the private well water at five houses on Cushman and Teawaddle Hill roads. The houses and the closed landfill are near the Amherst town line, McGinnis said. Quarterly testing of untreated domestic well water, required by the state Department of Environmental Protection as a result of the landfill closure, indicates high levels of iron and manganese in the water.
The plan, McGinnis said, is to connect the five houses to the Amherst public water line, and the people living in the houses will become customers of the Amherst Water Department. The state money will pay design and engineering fees. McGinnis said the remainder of the $2 million project will be financed Community Development Block Grant and MassWorks Infrastructure Program grant money.
McGinnis said the landfill was capped about 25 years ago. She explained part of the capping process was the continued monitoring of water at the five houses, all of which are inhabited. Water samples are taken from a tap after it has been filtered and from an outside faucet, where it is unfiltered. McGinnis said a consultant visits quarterly and the occupants have no issue will the testing.
“It’s their water we’re protecting,” she said.
McGinnis said the town delivers bottled water to two houses, including one that has no filtration system, with particularly high levels of manganese in the water. This may be naturally occurring or from the landfill. She said this has been routine for roughly five years. She said the consultant fees and bottled water have cost $29,000 each of the past two fiscal years.
Reach Domenic Poli at: dpoli@recorder.com or 413-772-0261, ext. 262.