Three bonds are on Rutland City’s ballot that voters will decide on come Town Meeting Day on March 7, and some should look familiar to residents who voted in recent years.
Each bond will go toward ongoing infrastructure projects within the city. Of the total of $7.85 million, $3.5 million would go toward street and sidewalk repairs, $2.5 million to water infrastructure, and $1.85 million would help complete two water quality improvement projects.
Public Works Commissioner James Rotondo said voters have been very receptive to the city’s infrastructure investments in the past, and he hopes they will be this year, too.
“I think they have a good understanding of the challenges we have regarding our infrastructure,” he said. “We’re very hopeful that that trend continues.”
Streets and sidewalks
The first bond asks voters to approve $3.5 million for street and sidewalk projects. Of that, $1.5 million would fund culvert replacements on Grove Street and Lincoln Avenue, extensions of a bond that was approved in 2019 for six projects but was big enough to complete only four, Rotondo said.
“With inflationary pressures, these projects have been coming in more expensive than originally estimated,” he said. “What we asked for was another million and a half dollars to make up the shortfall — the funding shortfall — for these last two projects.”
The other $2 million from that bond would be evenly split between street repairs and sidewalk repairs throughout the city, according to the ballot item. That money would supplement previous sidewalk and street repair bonds from 2020, Rotondo said.
“With this additional million dollars, it would really translate into two more years of significant paving,” he said. “And with respect to sidewalks — same thing. We have some money left over from the initial bond, but we knew it wasn’t going to be enough to really take care of some of our worst areas, so we’re asking for another million dollars.”
Rotondo said that $1 million translates to just over 2 miles of sidewalk repair. He said he could not estimate how much street paving the other million dollars will allow because paving challenges vary from street to street.
Replacing water mains
The second bond would allocate $2.5 million toward replacing water mains, a long-term project the city has been working on and likely will continue for some time, Rotondo said.
He said his department did a study a decade ago that found that, to get water mains “up to snuff,” the city would need to spend a million dollars every year for 100 years.
Rutland City has 83 miles of water mains beneath its streets, Rotondo said. Twenty-two of those 83 miles are cast-iron pipes that are more than 125 years old. Rotondo said the useful life of cast iron is usually around 100 years.
“So we try to do a water project every couple of years, and they’re usually in the range of this one: $2.5 million,” Rotondo said.
He said the water main bond and the street paving bond are interrelated, in that some paving projects cannot be completed until the water mains below the street are replaced.
“We’ve got a lot of streets around the city that we’ve held off paving because we’ve got deficient utilities beneath the pavement,” he said. “We want to replace those pipes first.”
A split between two projects
The third bond would provide $1.85 million for two projects: $750,000 toward the Combination and Piedmont Pond Improvements Project, and $1.1 million toward the Meadow Street Combined Sewer Separation Project.
The first project is aimed at lowering the temperature of the Moon Brook watershed by improving two ponds — Piedmont and Combination — and would cost an estimated $750,000, according to the ballot.
Rotondo said the two ponds would be dredged, sediment would be removed, the water level would be lowered and trees would be planted around the ponds to provide shade, all in an effort to cool the temperature level of the Moon Brook watershed.
“It’s got a high temperature and it doesn’t support, say, trout or coldwater fish,” Rotondo said of Moon Brook. “So this project is trying to rehabilitate those ponds so that in the summertime the temperature doesn’t rise.”
The Meadow Street Combined Sewer Separation Project is designed to reduce sewer overflows that occur during heavy rains, Rotondo said.
The city would disconnect 14 catch basins along Meadow Street, Traverse Place and West Street so stormwater would be separated from water that flows through the city’s sewage treatment system, and therefore lessen the likelihood of a sewage overflow, he said.
“The more catch basins you can take off the combined system, the more you can reduce the impact of stormwater, reducing the number and the volume of overflows,” Rotondo said.
Both projects have received state grants but not enough to complete them, so the city is asking voters to make up the difference, Rotondo said.
“That’s the funding shortfall,” he said.
