ERVING — Annual Town Meeting was speedy Wednesday evening as all 25 warrant articles were unanimously approved without debate in less than an hour and a half.
The 7 p.m. meeting’s greatest impediment was a technical difficulty involving a faulty cable that caused buzzing over the speakers in the Erving Elementary School gymnasium. Participation from roughly three dozen residents primarily consisted of clarifying questions and inquiries about statistics.
Appropriation of $1.6 million for replacement of the Church Street Bridge was both a topic of high interest before the meeting and a topic of relatively lengthy discussion during the meeting. The first order of business for the Selectboard was clarifying that the Planning Board — whose support for the corresponding Article 15 wasn’t logged — didn’t log support solely because language for the item had only been finalized after the boards’ last joint meeting.
“They did support, obviously, the planning that went along with this,” Selectboard Chair Jacob Smith clarified.
Smith then announced that Erving is “actively looking” for funding from grants and other sources before yielding the floor to Town Administrator Bryan Smith to describe the bridge’s design.
“It’s a three-sided box structure,” Bryan Smith said. “It’s got a decorative stone stamping to it, but it will be concrete. It will have two lanes. It will have a sidewalk.”
Other approved articles included appropriating $20,000 from the Public, Educational and Governmental Access Cable Revenue Account to benefit Erving’s community access TV channel in a multi-year cable contract with Comcast; allocation of $161,383 for elected officials’ salaries; $3.31 million for Erving Elementary School operations; and $637,000 for various capital improvement projects including preparation for a new cemetery and Bridge Street renovations.
Upon public request, town officials presented an update on the French King Bridge safety barrier installation project following completion of warrant article approval.
“It looks like they’re trying to mobilize to our towns for June,” Bryan Smith said of the state Department of Transportation (MassDOT), which is carrying out the project in Erving and Gill. “There may be a slow startup, so you may start to see equipment arrive. You may start to see more presence from the contractors and MassDOT in town. They will start this summer and I believe they will start on one side of the bridge. I believe they’re starting on the north, but that could change.”
The project to install safety barriers at the bridge, which has garnered a reputation as a destination for suicides, was delayed after being kept off MassDOT’s Capital Investment Plan in the spring of 2020. It wasn’t until February 2021, following a series of inquiries from town officials, that MassDOT announced the project is finally moving ahead, with construction planned for the summer of 2022. The project went out to bid on Jan. 8. State and federal funding has been granted for the project.
Jacob Smith said that in terms of “scope and time … we’re talking years.”
“Unfortunately, because the decking needs to be extended to support the barriers, it will not be on the front end or the early side of the project to see those in place,” he said.
“I do believe they will finish this season,” Bryan Smith added, “hopefully before the snow flies, on one side, and then they’ll have to resume construction in spring on the other side.”
Reach Julian Mendoza
at 413-772-0261, ext. 261 or jmendoza@recorder.com.