Wilton Road Repair To Cost Approx. $5 Million

Sixty-six inches of snow last year, heavy water drainage, expanding fissures, and general wear-and-tear have put at least 40-percent of Wilton’s roadways in a badly deteriorated condition. Wilton will be undertaking a long-term—perhaps five years—project to repair the town’s roadways. A summary of the project was the first issue of the night at last night’s Board of Selectmen meeting located at .

Some quick facts about Wilton’s new road project:

• 40-percent of Wilton’s roads “haven’t had any maintenance in 20 years,”  and “many of those are major roads,” according to First Selectman William Brennan.
• An early estimate of the road restoration project  indicates it will cost about $1 million a year for five years
• The estimated $5-million cost will have to come in supplement to the regularly-allocated road management (DPW) fund of approx. $650,000 annually (this expenses usually increases on a year-to-year basis)
• There will be little state grant money to cover this cost
• The project will be detailed during Fiscal Year 2013 budget talks
• It costs about $130,000 a mile to restore a road
• The project goes beyond milling and paving, which leads to a two-phase plan: one phase which uses money from the $650k annum budget, and another which draws from the $1-million restoration project
• There are 127 miles of roads in Wilton. That does not include state roads (such as Rte.102 or Rte 6) or any of the 81 private roads located in town.
• Asphalt has increased 40-percent since 2009, up to the current rate of $98 a ton
• The current annual increase of the DPW’s road-maintenance fund cannot keep up with the amount of roads needing to be repaved at their current status and rate of deterioration.
• The average ‘life-span’ of a road is 15 years.
• The most recent road restoration project in Wilton occurred in 1989  and lasted through 1993. This does not include milling and paving, which the DPW performs as an upkeep. 

“If we don’t do something [soon], the cost down the line is going to be horrendous,” said chair of the DPW Thomas Thurkettle. Thurkettle confirmed roads needing restoration were deteriorated beyond the capacity of the current $650k maintenance budget.

“The cost to restore roads in the first 10-15 years is minimal. [Beyond that] it increases four-to-five times,” echoed Brennan.

Part of the board’s presentation of the project involved a comparison to how neighboring towns handled their road repair: Redding is in the middle of awhich costs about $8 million; Ridgefield recently had a 10-year program started in 1997 that cost between $1.2 and $1.5 million a year; New Canaan is undergoing a 5-year project that costs approx. $2 million a year. However, New Canaan opted to contract a company to oversee the project, something that Wilton won’t do because its DPW has laid the groundwork that such vendor would have had to be paid to do.

“Pot holes, curbing, drainage, and overall surface of the roads…is the number-one complaint” Wiltonians make to town hall, said Brennan.