Weston's Board of Selectmen on Thursday, Oct. 15, approved $76,000 for the town's engineers to redesign the Valley Forge Road project in a smaller form, hoping to keep the state grant of more than $5 million that pays for most of it.
The board voted to move $31,000 from the finished Lyons Plains Road project and add $45,000 in new money. Both pieces still need Board of Finance approval.
The project as first designed drew "public comments and resistance," Town Administrator Karl Kilduff wrote in a memo to the board. The town asked the state Department of Transportation whether it could change the project and still keep the grant. The money comes from the state's LOTCIP program, under which the state pays to build a local road project and the town pays for its design.
"They opened the door to flexibility," Kilduff told the board. The redesign aims "to stay within the existing limits of the pavement," he said.
Of the $76,000, $41,000 is a flat fee for the redesign. The other $35,000 is an hourly budget to carry the design through state approval and any local permits. The request replaces an earlier $75,000 request for a survey of the road, which never went to the Board of Finance.
Selectwoman Lauren Traum said she thought redesigning was a good idea but asked how likely it was to work. "It seems like it would be wasteful to keep putting money towards design," she said, if the town would still need residents' permission for some of the work. She also noted that the town had withdrawn two earlier applications to the Conservation Commission, and that the commission had raised significant concerns and found the application incomplete.
Kilduff said that if the redesign works as planned, the town would not need to work on private property or get easements from property owners, and it "would be a much more vanilla project." The state won't sign off without drawings: "If they don't have a concept, it's just a conversation." The engineers, he said, "have a good sense that it's something we can do."
Whether the state will accept the smaller design is not yet known.