Shelton Aldermen Talk $5M Road Referendum

The City of Shelton has spent $5 million in the past two years to rehabilitate nearly 53 miles of road, and is asking voters to approve $5 million more Tuesday.

The request will be one of four referendum questions on the ballot for Shelton voters.

Last month Public Works Director Paul DiMauro gave a committee of Aldermen a presentation on the city’s recent work, which was funded by a $4 million referendum approved by voters in 2010 and a $1 million appropriation in this year’s budget.

It’s not economically feasible to completely rebuild and repave every road, DiMauro said. Doing so would cost too much.

The numbers are staggering,” DiMauro told the Aldermen. You could never do all the city with paving. You just can’t come up with enough money, trust me, to do that with.”

If you did just the remaining arterial roads in the the city that have not been touched in a few years, you could blow through $5 million if you do milling and reconstruction,” he said later. Am I going to do that? No. You’ve got to stretch the dollars as much as you can.”

So instead, the city uses a combination of paving, chip sealing, and crack sealing to get the most it can out of the money allotted.

DiMauro gave the Aldermen a list of the roads rehabiliated with the $5 million in recent appropriations which is embedded below. Article continues after the document.

Shelton Pavement Rehabilitation

The city also published a map of the recent improvements on its website. A large printout of the map has also been hung up in the first floor corridor at City Hall.

The map shows what work has been done to which roads. But don’t expect officials to say which roads they expect to be working on if the referendum question is approved.

I don’t think we want to be in a bidding war with one neighborhood against another on what roads are going to be done,” DiMauro said.

He said he meets with city engineers as well as public works employees to schedule the work.

We sit, we review, I get input from the engineering office and from highways,” DiMauro said. Then I look at all of them together and we collectively decide on which roads are done.”

I know you get a lot of heat from your constituents,” he told Aldermen, but trust that we’re trying to do the best job that we can for everybody in the city.”

DiMauro said the city uses a combination of outside contractors and its own workers to do the roadwork. For example, the recent repaving of part of Prospect Avenue near City Hall was done in-house, he said.

You did a good job,” Alderman Jack Finn said.

They did a very good job,” DiMauro said. They did as good as any contractor I’ve seen do.”

Aldermanic President John Anglace said property taxes won’t go up if the money is approved.

The impact on taxes is not going to be measurable,” he said. When voters approve $5 million, we don’t spend it. It takes us a couple years to spend it down. In the meantime we take bond anticipation notes and we just have to pay the interest on them. So there’s no immediate impact on taxes. That bond anticipation interest is not going to have an impact on the mill rate.”

Other Aldermen at the meeting said that while the city’s roads aren’t perfect, they have gotten a lot better recently.

I think there’s been a significant improvement,” said Alderman Stanley Kudej. Some people have not been happy with the chip sealing, but it’s better than it was.”

In the last three years I think a tremendous amount has been done with saving the roads and doing more where we need to be with the roads,” Alderman Eric McPherson, the chairman of the streets committee, said. We really have come quite far from the past.”

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