With funds from a state grant in hand, town officials are upgrading trails at Waveny so that they drain and hold better.
New Canaan got $150,000 from the state that will go toward replacing soggy trails with a processed milling base at two main trails in Waveny, with leftover funds to be dedicated toward a third stretch, according to Tiger Mann, assistant director of the New Canaan Department of Public Works and senior engineer for the town.
TIger Mann, New Canaan's senior engineer and assistant director of the Public Works Department. Credit: Michael Dinan
“With the trails, for a long time they [town officials] were putting woodchips in and they would just get soggy and gather water and start to erode,” Mann said. “So this is taking all of that out and putting in a nice, proper base of gravel, so that they all drain. And then if we need crossings, because we have streams coming down off of South Avenue, we put in a little crossing and put a trail up over the top of it.”
The work will be done in two phases and will cover the stretch of trail that runs from Lapham Road (near the Merritt Parkway overpass) toward South Avenue. This type of work already has been done on much of that trail, officials say. The other trails to be targeted include the one the runs alongside the road through Waveny from the South Avenue entrance to the “four-way intersection” where the Carriage Barn roadway comes in (below the water tower fields). If there’s money left for it, public works then will contract out to work on the trails that run between the Waveny road and Farm Road, Mann said.