Weekly road meeting takes questions

SHARON — Every Friday morning the Board of Selectmen holds a special meeting for updates on the town’s road repair project. At the July 1 meeting, it was announced that road repair work for the following week (July 5 to 8) would take place on Sharon Mountain Road, East Street and Fairchild Road. Additionally, work would be done to complete the remaining private driveways on the list. About 10 people attended the meeting.Sharon resident Kathy Fricker, who lives on Lambert Road, was there, accompanied by her father, Harry Hall.Fricker had a list of questions that she read to the board.The first was, “Exactly how much money was approved at the town meeting I attended last fall when the town overwhelmingly supported an extensive program of road repairs in the neighborhood of $3 million?”Loucks replied the amount approved at the town meeting was $6,280,000 but not all of that sum was for the road repair project. “Of that total,” he said, “$145,000 is going for financing and $187,000 was to be earmarked for culvert repairs on West Woods Road No. 2, but we are actually holding out $200,000 for that.”Fricker asked, “I noticed that local property taxes have not gone up, which is very pleasant and also somewhat surprising in view of this extensive road repair work. Where is the money which is being spent coming from? I assume it has to be borrowed. Is that true, and if so at what interest rate is the town being charged?”“Right know we have a bond anticipation note and we will be going into a bond sometime in August,” Loucks said. “Your taxes will go up a little bit next year. We are going to pay for this project over a 15-year period. We were given amortization tables for other terms but the Board of Finance opted to go for the 15 years, paying the interest on the first year (which will show up in your taxes next year). Then we are going to skip a year on the principal, so the principal will start kicking in the following year. “The interest rate has not been determined. It will only come out just prior to the bond in August. We have a meeting on July 6 with Moody’s rating system. Right now we have an AA2 rating, which is the highest rating a town our size can have. I am sure our bond rating will stay the same, even though the state’s bond rating was lowered. As of now it looks like bond rates for AA2 rated places is 3.25 percent.”Fricker asked, “How much money has been spent or will have been spent by the end of June 2011? And of that sum where are the funds coming from, for example from the large appropriation approved by town meeting for part of it — with the balance coming from what other sources?”The first selectman began his answer by saying, “I think we will be a few roads short. When we were going through the project we ran into areas where the blacktop was up to 10 or 12 inches thick and the reclaimer could not get through it, so several inches had to be milled off before the reclaiming work could begin. “This happened on parts of Calkinstown, White Hollow, Jackson Hill and Fairchild roads. “We used those millings to back up alongside roads, especially on hills. This drives up the project costs. “Therefore, there will be a couple of roads that will not be completed. I’m looking at small, dead-end roads to leave unfinished. We’ll have to wait and see how this plays out. We may end up overlaying a couple of roads, which means not reclaiming them. And on sections of road that are not really in bad shape we will just put an inch-and-a-half overlay. “We will end up completing close to 95 percent of the project.”Selectman Meg Szalewicz had a computer printout showing that almost $3 million of the budgeted road repair project has been spent to date.“We have not spent anything beyond what was approved and the town treasurer has all that information,” Loucks said in response to another inquiry. Fricker’s last question was, “At the town meeting, we talked about an eventual bond issue to help finance this sizable expenditure. At that time no decisions had been made. It was hoped that the current financial situation in the state and the country would permit a bond issue which might be attractive to the town. “Do you have or can you supply us with any up-to-date forecasts as to the amount that will be required for such a bond issue and if so how much can we expect to pay? What effect will that have on the mill rate?”The first selectman replied that those issues had already been addressed.There was also a question about unimproved roads. The first selectman said those roads cost the town considerably more to maintain than improved paved roads, but local residents love and want their dirt roads.

Latest News

South Kent School’s unofficial March reunion

Elmarko Jackson was named a 2023 McDonald’s All American in his senior year at South Kent School. He helped lead the Cardinals to a New England Prep School Athletic Conference (NEPSAC) AAA title victory and was recruited to play at the University of Kansas. This March he will play point guard for the Jayhawks when they enter the tournament as a No. 4 seed against (13) Samford University.

Riley Klein

SOUTH KENT — March Madness will feature seven former South Kent Cardinals who now play on Division 1 NCAA teams.

The top-tier high school basketball program will be well represented with graduates from each of the past three years heading to “The Big Dance.”

Keep ReadingShow less
Hotchkiss grads dancing with Yale

Nick Townsend helped Yale win the Ivy League.

Screenshot from ESPN+ Broadcast

LAKEVILLE — Yale University advanced to the NCAA men’s basketball tournament after a buzzer-beater win over Brown University in the Ivy League championship game Sunday, March 17.

On Yale’s roster this year are two graduates of The Hotchkiss School: Nick Townsend, class of ‘22, and Jack Molloy, class of ‘21. Townsend wears No. 42 and Molloy wears No. 33.

Keep ReadingShow less
Handbells of St. Andrew’s to ring out Easter morning

Anne Everett and Bonnie Rosborough wait their turn to sound notes as bell ringers practicing to take part in the Easter morning service at St. Andrew’s Church.

Kathryn Boughton

KENT—There will be a joyful noise in St. Andrew’s Church Easter morning when a set of handbells donated to the church some 40 years ago are used for the first time by a choir currently rehearsing with music director Susan Guse.

Guse said that the church got the valuable three-octave set when Harlem Valley Psychiatric Center closed in the late 1980s and the bells were donated to the church. “The center used the bells for music therapy for younger patients. Our priest then was chaplain there and when the center closed, he brought the bells here,” she explained.

Keep ReadingShow less
Picasso’s American debut was a financial flop
Picasso’s American debut was a financial flop
Penguin Random House

‘Picasso’s War” by Foreign Affairs senior editor Hugh Eakin, who has written about the art world for publications like The New York Review of Books, Vanity Fair, The New Yorker and The New York Times, is not about Pablo Picasso’s time in Nazi-occupied Paris and being harassed by the Gestapo, nor about his 1937 oil painting “Guernica,” in response to the aerial bombing of civilians in the Basque town during the Spanish Civil War.

Instead, the Penguin Random House book’s subtitle makes a clearer statement of intent: “How Modern Art Came To America.” This war was not between military forces but a cultural war combating America’s distaste for the emerging modernism that had flourished in Europe in the early decades of the 20th century.

Keep ReadingShow less