Panel Rethinks Main Street Sidewalk, Path Plans

ORLEANS – Voters at last week’s annual town meeting passed a capital improvement budget for the new fiscal year. But it came at the expense of a plan to explore options for new sidewalks and multi-use pathways along a stretch of Main Street.
 
A motion was made at the May 12 session to approve the budget without $100,000 to look at the feasibility of making those improvements to Main Street from Route 28 to Beach Road. 

“I mean, I don’t understand why we would spend $100,000 on something that has not been approved,” said Orleans resident Renee Andre.

But proponents of the project, including members of the town’s transportation and bikeways advisory committee that have been working toward improvements along the roadway, say that funding is needed to survey the existing stretch of Main Street and to give voters the information they need in order to decide if it’s a project they want to follow through with.
 
“It was said, ‘This is designed. This is already a foregone conclusion.’ It’s really not,” Griffin Ryder of the advisory committee said during the committee’s meeting May 13, the day following the spring town meeting.
 
The push-back on the project led committee members to rethink their approach. That could involve simplifying the proposed work to help ease voter concerns and win public support.

The committee came into town meeting with two alternatives for improving the Main Street stretch for access and safety. The first called for the creation of a 5.5-foot-wide sidewalk on the north side of the road and the creation of five-foot bike lanes on both sides. The second option involved improving the sidewalk on the north side and creating a shared-use path on the south side of the road. 

But based on the feedback from town meeting, committee member Stephanie Gaskill said she wondered if the alternatives as designed “push the envelope” too far for voters.

“Do we need to propose something that is less than those?” she said.

Alice Thomason, the committee’s chair, suggested that the description of the project in the capital improvement budget as a “reconstruction” may have misrepresented what was being proposed and turned voters away from the project.

If approved, the $100,000 would have been used to study the project area to find out what land the town owns. That would allow the town to more precisely design the project.
Mefford Runyon, the select board’s liaison to the advisory committee, favored simplifying the scope of the project.

“Just hire the surveyors you need to find the boundaries of the town-owned land,” he said. “The fact that we’re just trying to stake out what the town owns wasn’t as clearly stated as it should have been.”

A similar field survey was done as part of efforts to bring sewer to East Main Street, Thomason noted. She suggested that the town could work with the boundaries identified in that survey, and that the new survey could be used to “fill in the data gaps” as needed. This could help reduce the proposed $100,000 cost, she said.

But above all else, committee members and other officials say that additional public outreach will be needed. Public Works Director Rich Waldo recommended that the committee “let the dust settle” from town meeting before organizing another public outreach session at the end of the summer.

“We don’t have to show them any design alternatives,” he said. “We just get their feedback.”

Lindsey Goodman of the advisory committee suggested that organized public walks of the proposed work area be held, while Waldo suggested that the committee garner the support of the town’s business community for the proposed work.

“We actually did do that and they’re incredibly supportive,” Thomason said.

The Main Street work is one of three roadway improvement projects that the advisory committee is working on. The others involve similar improvements on Beach Road and Old Colony Way. Waldo said a $350,000 request for design and engineering funds for Old Colony Way will likely be put before voters at a special town meeting in October. The question for the committee, he said, is if it also wants to bring back a request for funding for the Main Street work in the fall as well.

“We don’t have to decide it today, but I think for next meeting we should really be starting to strategize what we’re going to do,” he said.

Email Ryan Bray at ryan@capecodchronicle.com