The Hillsborough County Superior Court has approved Peterborough’s request for a Jan. 15 Special Town Meeting to appropriate additional funds for the Main Street Bridge reconstruction project.
The meeting is planned to begin at 7 p.m. in the Upper Hall of the Town House. All Peterborough residents are invited to attend and vote.
The town has been working to repair and reconstruct the deteriorating Main Street Bridge since 2006, Bartlett said. The Special Meeting was requested in November 2019 after the low bid for the project totaled $7.381 million, $781,000 over the initial $6.6 million appropriated for the project.
“Seemingly, most projects of recent bidding are [coming in] above engineer’s estimates,” Bartlett said, citing high demand for a limited number of contractors and employees. For instance, the lowest responsible bid for the separate Route 202 reconstruction project came in $3 million over its $4.9 million engineer’s estimate this year, he said.
At the meeting, residents will be asked to vote on a bond article that seeks to raise and appropriate an additional $1,400,000 for the Main Street Bridge reconstruction project, which includes a $600,000 contingency fund to preempt the need for any additional fund approvals for the project. The town is liable to contribute a maximum of twenty percent of the requested funds, or $280,000, Bartlett said.
“All the ducks are in a row,” he said, adding that a failure to authorize the additional funds wouldn’t just delay the Main Street Bridge project construction. If the additional funds are not approved, the next opportunity to appropriate project funds is the regular town meeting in May, by which point the town would lose the current lowest responsible bid for the project, and jeopardize access to the federal funds currently approved for the project, Bartlett said.
He said that appropriating additional funds for the Main Street Bridge project will be the only article considered at the meeting. The meeting will begin with a 20 minute presentation, and the polls will be open for one hour afterward. Repairs to Route 202 will not factor into the request or discussion.