During Monday evening’s West Windsor Selectboard meeting, Tim Jones, program manager for Green Mountain Power, proposed a $400,000 project to refurbish power lines along Brownsville-Hartland Road.
“Essentially, this construction project will span from outside our door here to the intersection at the bottom of Hammond Hill, along with a large component of the project going down to Coon Club Road,” Jones said.
Jones explained that the proposed work would begin at the stretch of road in front of town hall. “[This would be] shared with the sidewalk project, with whom we will work to smooth out the sidewalks and get rid of unnecessary poles in the pavement. We also plan to get into whatever underground utilities there are down here in this intersection of Route 44 and Hartland Road.”
“We have been planning this project for over a year now, with an ideal finish date set for this August,” said Jones. “We are currently into year two of our two-year Capital Improvement Program at Green Mountain Power. Our program ends September 30, 2026. We have about 40 projects left to finish across 15 towns. We’d like to start this specific project in May. Once everything is cleared, we can get line of sight on all the roadside infrastructure again, complete a pre-construction inventory list, and understand the different substrates we are going to be dealing with, as well as where the construction will be above and below ground.”
According to Jones, the proposed project would serve a dual purpose of repairing the Hartland Road while also refurbishing the powerlines that hang in the area.
The board advised Jones to return once the snow melts to finalize the plan before their ideal start date in May.
Following the presentation, West Windsor town administrator Matt Frederick told the Standard, “The project funding will be supplied by Green Mountain Power, but they will need selectboard approval to work in the town’s right-of-way. They’ve been doing similar work in other Vermont towns as part of their Zero Outages Initiative. Their representatives will meet with West Windsor’s Highway Foreman in the early spring once enough snow has melted to be able to do a thorough site review. I expect Green Mountain Power will be aiming to speak with the selectboard again for the official sign off on their proposal sometime in the March or April timeframe.”
For more on this, please see our Jan. 15 edition of the Vermont Standard.
