According to the chairman of Damariscotta’s Board of Selectmen Richard McLean, “the town won’t walk away on Heater Rd.,” though no final plan of action was set out during the selectmen’s March 18 meeting. “We’ve got to put an end to this,” McLean said.
An article in the March 19 edition of The Lincoln County News reported Heater Rd. disintegrated into an impassable mud pit on March 15 and for $4136, the road was patched.
The bulk of the selectmen’s meeting was a discussion about what to do with the Heater Road and the appropriateness (or not) of the town coming in and making a recent repair. Since Heater Rd. is not town-owned but is rather a series of property easements, there has been controversy over who’s responsible for repairs made to it.
The $4136 quoted to make a quick fix comes from the town’s road reserve fund, McLean said, “but the problem with Heater Rd. is a long-term one; at least for the last 10-plus years I’ve been hearing about it.”
McLean said the good part of the problem stems from the “topography of the long, flat stretch,” where water accumulates creating the mud problem. Since heavy trucks and equipment (some contracted to the town) travel the road to get to the salt shed, “we (the town) are a user of that road. Every couple of years, we have to dump in some gravel,” McLean said.
Whether or not the road disintegration is caused entirely by the town, McLean feels the town has a stake in making repairs.
A group of Heater Rd. residents have spoken to the selectmen, and basically said, “Here we go again,” McLean said.
With the warm weather approaching, the mud issue is going to resurface since the recent fix is viewed as getting the road passable until summer.
The town is faced with multiple options, all of which are “complicated.” The selectmen charged Damariscotta Town Manager Greg Zinser with researching the possibility of taking ownership of the problematic stretch of road; or perhaps exiting the salt shed by a different route, avoiding Heater Rd. entirely. “We need to find out what would be the costs and complications of going out by the firehouse,” McLean said.
Another option is forming an association with the town and the abutters, and then sharing the costs of making any necessary repairs.
“All options are fraught with costs and difficulties,” McLean said.
In the past, the town made the minor repairs, McLean said, “but this time, we are not moving on; we are going to do something.”
If the town determines another route to and from the salt shed is the answer, “we just won’t walk away; we’ll return the road to its ‘pre-catastrophic’ condition,” said McLean.
