Saying it will help pedestrians and bolster security at South School, town officials on Tuesday approved an approximately $150,000 contract to install new sidewalks along Gower Road near the school.
The Board of Selectmen voted 3-0 in favor of the contract with locally based Peter Lanni Inc. to install the sidewalks and ramps on the south side of Gower Road from Southwood Drive to South School.
Though there’s a sidewalk on the north side of Gower there, “there are no sidewalks from South School to Southwood, and any resident that’s living in the Southwood Drive area and elsewhere, has to cross the street to come up the sidewalk to cross the street back again,” Public Works Director Tiger Mann told the selectmen at their regular meeting, held in Town Hall.
“And then if you are wanting to go into town or to another school, they’re asking not to travel through South School to get to the high school or get to Saxe,” he continued. “They’d like you to stay on Gower Road and not travel through—for security reasons—to travel through the campus. So therefore this sidewalk is also important for students that just need to get to Saxe or to the high school as well.”
First Selectman Kevin Moynihan and Selectmen Kathleen Corbet and Nick Williams voted in favor of the $150,040.80 contract.
School officials are “well aware of the project and very much in favor of it,” Mann said.
“We’ll do it during school season but I don’t think it should be much of a detriment to anything that’s happening inside school noise-wise or anything of that nature,” he said.
The selectmen asked whether the new sidewalk will run into what is now the street (just by one or two feet) and whether there’s parking on the south side of Gower there (no).
In responding to a question from Corbet, Mann added that although historically there’s been no parking there, “if we do get parents who try to park along the side, we might have to enforce that a little bit.”
“But now given the fact that there’s a hard curb, we’re hoping they won’t mount the hard curb onto the sidewalk,” he said. “When it was just a soft shoulder it was a lot easier to park on the grass. Now we’ll ask them to park elsewhere.”