Arlington sidewalk project makes ‘next step’ – more to follow

Andrew McKeever Photo

A proposed sidewalk project to link the village with the Rec Park may be in the offing, following a state grant of $302,000 to connect existing sidewalk to another extension to be built on the opposite side of Route 7A.

Andrew McKeever

GNAT News Project

ARLINGTON — The town’s Select Board has formally approved a state grant totaling $302,800 to help design and construct a sidewalk that will connect the Recreation Park to the village’s downtown center.

Notification that the town’s application for the funding had been approved arrived last month. It will help finance about 80 percent of the estimated cost of the project, which is reckoned to reach $376,000. The remaining 20 percent of the cost will need to come from local funds before the sidewalk will be constructed. The construction itself may still be a couple of years away.

The proposal calls for renovating an existing sidewalk which runs from the area around the town office on the east side of Route 7A or Main Street to where it peters out just past the Arlington Inn. A crosswalk would be put in place near the intersection of Routes 313 and 7A, and a new sidewalk, running along the western side of Route 7A, would be built until it reaches an existing trail network within the Rec Park, just north of the Chem Clean gas station and convenience store.

This would allow pedestrians walking from the town, and also from the nearby Fisher Elementary School and Arlington Memorial Middle and High School, to walk to the Rec Park on a clearly marked sidewalk more safely than at present.

The Bennington County Regional Commission did a study and filed a report with town officials in November, 2015.  It developed several alternatives; the “preferred” one being an option that reconstructed the existing marble sidewalk from the town hall north along the east side of Route 7A. The reconstruction would be done using marble pieces set into a concrete base. This sidewalk comes to an end just past the Arlington Inn, where a new 180 foot long, five foot-wide strip would be built, separated from the roadway.

A crosswalk, about 280 feet north of the intersection of Routes 7A and 313 would be put in place, and link to an eight foot-wide path, wide enough for bicycles and pedestrians, that would run along the west side of Route 7A to the Rec Park past Chem Clean, where it would tie into the existing trail network to the Rec Park.

However it may be awhile before residents notice anything different along the proposed path. In an email, Select Board member Cynthia Browning said they were only at the start of a multi-year process. This was confirmed by the regional commission, which noted that there would be a period of time before construction would start to allow for all the pieces of the project to obtain final go-ahead clearances.