Government
New $50,000 Safe Pedestrian Walkway at Waveny Garners Support
|
Finance officials on Thursday voiced support for a proposed walkway in Waveny that’s designed to take distracted and baby stroller-pushing pedestrians out of the busy access road to Lapham Community Center. First Selectman Rob Mallozzi, presiding as chairman over a regular Board of Finance meeting, said he views the estimated $50,000 project as addressing an important “safety issue.”
“I’d like to get this done,” Mallozzi said during the meeting, held in the Sturgess Room at the New Canaan Nature Center. “This is like something that we have all seen, but we haven’t seen it,” he said and added to Recreation Director Steve Benko: “I applaud you for seeing it.”
Benko presented the new pedestrian walkway to the finance board as part of his fiscal year 2016 budget requests (see ‘Waveny Trail Resurfacing’ on page 60 here). “We have a lot of pedestrian traffic on that road during the day ,and all different times, and people are walking with strollers and people jogging with their headsets on,” Benko said. “It’s creating a dangerous situation—we’ve got people on the road not paying attention to traffic, we’re getting a lot of traffic, people going to Lapham Center during the day, a lot of people go down to use the Lapham Center parking, they have activities on the water tower turf field, it is becoming an accident waiting to happen.”
With $50,000, a 6- or 8-foot-wide processed stone walkway could be installed off of the main road through Waveny at Lapham accessway (right there at the dog park), and along the east (softball and soccer fields) side of the road.