okay this is a town of Andover special town meeting for Thursday August 1st the electors and citizens qualified to vote in town meetings in the town of and over are hereby notified that a special town meeting will be held in the town office building community room and our first order of business is to choose a moderator meting any any nominations nomin W do we have a second Nom second over there Bob hambur so Donley Nom all those in favor any item number two to see if the town will approve the receip of Grant of $83,000 for the fiscal year 2024 2025 Department of energy and Environmental Protection recreational Trails program requiring a town match of $21,000 from the town multiuse building
fund to fund the design of a pathway between the municipal complex and the Hop River Trail through town-owned land at this point I'm going to turn it over to Eric Anderson presentation on all right folks can everybody hear me yes okay so we're going to Jeff says I have four minutes to do this so I will go quickly probably take more than four okay so our church requires us to go to special meeting anytime we as a town accept a grant that's the grant is more than $2500 and there's any Town contribution even Public Works doing a little road work it has to go to town meeting so that's what we're here for so I applied for D wck Trails Grant this spring the goal of this was to design an improv Percy cook Trail so we as many of you know we last year we got a legislative appropriation of $100,000 to figure out where the trails should go and how it should work here so out of that came a desire for two Pathways one going down Route 316 and connecting to rail trail and a second one going through town property which combined make about a 2 Mile Loop so we tried to fund both of them with different mechanisms we went through a program called lsip to fund the pathway down Route 316 we did get a $2.9 million
lots of grant for the construction of that and that is in final design right now in fact you might seen the guys surveying on Route 316 still going to be a few years out still a lot more Outreach to the homeowners that needs to happen finalize design work with do back to the homeowners so it's not happening instantaneously the second half of this was a pathway that runs back through town property and also connects to the trail so we applied to d for the design funding and the reason I did that was in in the last four or five funding segments D has been much more likely to fund design studies and then a year or two later fund construction so that's the Rope we took
with that this is the fourth time I've applied to this program for funding and the first time we got it so defa committed $83,500 for the design the town matches 21,000 which will come from the multi-use building fund so it won't be additional taxation it's money we've already put away you know for construction projects so this is just kind of a summary of that for the Percy cook Trail the study we completed the initial study using 100% legislative grant funding now we're at the design permitting you know and so we're funding that 80% with State wck Trails Grant and 20% from the town we're looking to get the study going sometime middle to end of August we've already gone to RFP for the contractor that's or the engineering firm that's doing the design for both this part and this part so we don't need to Rego out to RFP and the location is the area between here and the Hop River Trail I'll show you mapping in a second so here's a breakdown of the cost estimate the top part is everything we're doing now so the bottom half is just a real you know one over the world estimate for the actual construction so this would be if it ever got actually built would be somewhere around a million dollar project and obviously we're not going to do that unless we have that funded so this is the overall plan let me zoom in on that this is what we're talking about so here we're in the lower corner where it says Community Center and the red line is the existing outline of the Percy cook Trail which follows the Old Logging Trail for the
last time that property got logged the problem is you see all those little lines up there that's really steep Contour so the town hall is about 380 ft in elevation it rises up to about 490 ft and then it drops back down down to about 330 ft so there's a lot of up and a lot of down there so the hard park has been coming up with the design which gets down below the 10% grade level so that it's actually walkable and bikable and you know it meets current you know so we've done an initial look at this using RAR data in the existing mapping that the town has and the next stage is to go back there and to survey it you know do core samples of the earth so you know what you're looking at and design the actual pathway so that's what this grant is
designed to do is get us up to a final design how they make that route go through and if we go back one slide you can see in green that is roughly the path that will be taken by the second trail that will run down 3 so you can see from where we are here that gives you roughly a two 2 m loop trail from this location where you don't have to worry about cars other than a little bit on Cyber m road so that is basically what we're applying to do and obviously it takes a town meeting to approve that funding so at this point I know I went through that
pretty quick but I'm happy to answer any questions that you all have this is putting up against the school property what is this right topail so the top of the trail will run rough it will stay on it will stay off the partiel that's quote unquote school property but it will run fairly close to it yes so is there any what does the school board said about this o the P the person cook is the one that goes off the back side of your school it's not the one that goes down 316 your other correct correct the P cook is the one that goes back through which color is it so it's the red going to the purple the purple is the revised the red is the existing Trail the purple is what you have to do if you want to make grade and make it something that's you know walkable if any of you walked up that rail trail you'll notice that's an extremely tough walk to make an impossible on a bike of any sort the question here is will this design study include what i' call cost benefit analysis you were talking about a project on the order of 1 mil and I'd like to have some estimates about how many users daily monthly seasonal basis you know and I would hope that that would be part of the design process to get that information as part of public Outreach second question is what provision for public input in the design process is theion so one of the things that is an absolute require M for D funding is
public engagement so there will be a multiple meetings on this and a public hearing on this prior to coming up with a final design yeah so the red is that currently a trail or is that just a proposed Trail well it's a wooden it's a trail that we keep walkable okay and it's it's marginally Mountain bikable until you get to the Steep section now it's not really ridable from you know the last third of a mile basically is is not really rival it's marginally walkable but not ridable in its current state it was the Old Logging Road for when they logged this property so that's there now so if we $100,000 goes to fun the design for the the purple area or well but there's also if you see the light blue those are those are areas that are wetlands so there's going to have to be some provision when
you're logging a road you can be less sensitive to wet Lings than you have to be if you're putting a permanent Trail so there's a bunch of design in the other spots and there will also be a fair bit of design when we get up into this area because part of the the issue we ran into is we developed a secondary path to get to the Percy cook trail from here so we could prevent people from having to cross school property when the Percy Trail was originally developed which is going back maybe eight or nine years and one of the issues that we had with that is that this section especially in years like this is extremely wet so even though we have permission from the gas line to cross in
a secondary spot that would this part here would need to be improved too because there is some some definite Wetlands Crossings and wetlands impacts there so that's a big part of the there's a fairly big Wetland design component to this to the design part you're saying the project itself ever came off in be over million if we paid the whole thing yes but you know any one mile Paving project these days is you know sure so you said 950,000 may be required for construction is the current estimate was that a so you said maybe about two years from now we might be able to apply for grant money is that right sure and is that going to also require about a 20 25% contribution from the town so it depends I mean my goal would another lsip grant part of the reason why I've done it this way is in the reason why we went after a legislative Grant in the first place is it's often harder to get design money than it is to get actual construction money once you've got essentially what they call a shovel ready project where you have an engineering design that you know the especially the dot has blessed it is easier then to actually fun construction so which is exactly what we did with 316
we went after Congressional or legislative money first used the legislative money for a study in preliminary design went applied the lsip got the lotet funding in the first go around which was pretty cool and so that project you know the town may have 20,000 $30,000 of skin in the game by the time we develop it but the state will have about 3 million so we funded almost the whole cost of this my goal is to do the same thing with this but I can't guarantee it and obviously if I'm standing up here in a couple years asking you for $200,000 that's a much bigger ask than the town and I recognize that will lot of fund something up to that amount yeah the only my only hesitation with lots is that right now the pipeline for lots of funding is filled out at least another five or six years so I don't know when they're going to have another lots of grant funding round available to us so that's kind of where I'm going with it I realiz it hasn't been entirely designed car sure has entir designed what's the WID you're envisioning you know like two people walking a breast yeah this will likely be a 10t I mean kind of the the do federal do standard for multi multi-use paths is a 10 foot wide path and the C so again and you're planning on pavement or something so the Steep part will absolutely be paved the rest of it could be stone dust
and it could be P it's going to kind of depend on what people want I don't have any pre I like rid and gravel so I'd be just as happy making it stone dust but there is more erosion you know maintenance costs are slightly higher with gravel than with pavement hi Doris M 33 c m road as a person born with disabilities and it's going to be Crossing in front of my house and my children's house I'm concerned about the three foot of that you mentioned that's that's up the code with the state and guidelines but for a wheelchair accessibility for accessibility walking it's a hazardous Trail as it is right now I can't even leave my driveway because on C Road people just rip zip right through away right now as it is so there are no stops on the road to prevent to slow
down so with this Trail and not being all paved how are is the town going to make sure Ure that it's not hazardous that it's accessible to all of us and that it's it's it's a safe a safe place to to walk or ride or have a wheelchair access so first of all will be unlike Cider Mill Road it will be 100% non-motorized traffic so so you know you won't have to worry about the automobile component so the upper part the part from the community center up past where it says views and it starts to go into the switch back that you can make a really mild grade so you know if you chose to pave it that whole section can be fully ADA Compliant where we get into the Steep section just simply because you know you have 150 ft of elevation gain and you have it in about a third of a mile no set of switchbacks will make that fully Ada accessible and because there's no Road there you can't apply proag so the majority of this will be Ada accessible but I I'm not saying the whole thing well sorry the the end part starts going down the Steep part will not be I wish we could figure out how to design it so that it would be but we just we don't own enough land there in enough way to make switchbacks to bring the grade down mar9 why do we ex this do we know how many people think they want to use this I mean they could go out to the trail anywhere there parking lots they've developed all the way along the way why do we think we need it from the community CER
we use this path So my answer to that is twofold first that was something that was identified in the last plan of conservation and development that was one of the goals which was linkage from this the municipal complex to the rail trail and then onto the ball fields down below so that's one component and the second thing is I think think in this day and age anything you can do to Pro to promote healthy activity and walking and biking is worthwhile for a community and if you look at where the youngest generation of people are moving
to you know there's a there is a a large movement of people towards areas that are walkable and bable and if we're going to people we're going to attract young families that's got to be part of the mix that we do as a town but we really don't want to attract people because of taxes most of the time and the school says so and it's going to cost 100,000 now and maybe up to a million all public work projects are expensive there's nothing you're doing today that's inexpensive so the Red Trail that we're looking at tonight with the paint attached to it that goes down to the rail trail picking it up near the museum no the museum is closer to where the green trail intercepts in fact the green trail intercepts the green pathway intercepts fairly close to where the museum is okay and is that green trail the second phase of this like tonight we're here for 8300 approval of this with 21 because of the red so correct there both of those Trails both of those pathways are proceeding down different funding they're at different stages and they're a different funding but both of those grants were gotten we proposed in both cases doing the opposite one to make it a so we wrote that into both grants that one of the objectives of this wasn't complet what the yellow the yellow the yellow is the existing Hot River State State Park okay State Park the existing rail trail corre yeah I I also wonder if we really need this we have lots of bike trails already you've seen them this is a potential boond of money be seeing in the next couple years here in this town
with the increase in the board of bed budget School attendance 20,000 it's not that much but 200,000 would be this is a the step in in that direction so I'm not not sure we really need this 16 the money you said is going to come from existing building fund correct I am assuming that what we talked about here and there the building you know that we're going to have a kitchen that as soon as we clear to do it which means you know pass a certain threshold after it's occupy and whatever but correct cut into that it is not that's part of the reason well this is one of the reasons why we've been funding the multi-use building fund on an ongoing basis we did put $50,000 into that in this budget cycle so we have enough to cover that the other thing to keep in mind is that we currently have a congressional request for funding that made it through the Senate Appropriations commission as a two days ago that will go a long way towards funding the second phase of what we're doing with the community center so what I'm trying to do is finish the community center and the generator for the for the three building complex out of mostly federal funds so I'm actually not using a lot of the multi-use building fund for that no guarantees I'm going to get it still got to go through but you know it
made it out of the the state funding mechanism and it made it through the the Senate Appropriations Committee so I think it has a reasonable chance of being funded I just have a quick one is there a list that we can look at anywhere that has a list of outstanding projects and their cost so at least we know when people are saying well this could be and we we'd know what we're looking at future for costs and I mean I have a list I've have not published that list okay but no reason we can okay nothing Secret Bob hamburger shotty m road I just want to point out that as a town we
really have three town centers we have the municipal Town Center here we have the historic town center which is where the railroad station was on Center Street and we have the athletic Town Center over where the fields are and we have very little to connect them so that somebody can walk or ride in between so from my perspective anything that we can do do to integrate this town so that those Town centers can be easily traversed by somebody on a bik of foot is a good idea Jeff valard Lake Road now when do you expect to have a certificate of occupancy on the seniors Community Center last week last week now once you get that certificate of occupany do that close the door on a million dollar budget no it's still part of the I mean the punch list and the final fees to the contract are all fit in under that if if we don't mind can we keep it to the issues related to this Grant and this application because that's what we're here for initially in this town meeting yeah my point being is that after a period of time when that million doll has done maybe the $21,000 that the town is putting into this be better SP on Senor center community center that's my opinion okay sure I just want to remind everybody that there was recently a death on 316 a guy was on a motor on a bicycle and U so someone who rides a bicycle would love to utilize these Trails I think it's a win I me I applaud Eric for doing this work and getting this Grant and U moving Our Town forward
like all the other towns are getting you know with trails that go through the town so that they go to different was and our roads you know when you try to go down Lake Road which would you could avoid it if you had that trail a lot of times we try to go down Lake Road to the Dollar General down there and that's please motion you can make a motion to vote on this okay I we vot on this proposal who second okay motion has made second you came in and checked in a paper bell yes no it's if you Mar the Bell they'll come around with bell Bo up [Music] second oh you get it get it got it got it thank you [Music] spe [Music] motion is passed 39 yes to 19 [Music]