For Public Safety—

Lakeview Terrace Improvements Sought

By Andrew Gorosko

Town officials are proposing initial steps toward converting Lakeview Terrace from a private road to a public road, with the public safety goal of bringing the mile-long dead-end street and stormwater drainage facilities there up to modern standards.

Town officials met with about 50 residents of the Lakeview Terrace area on November 23 to explain their aims in seeking to improve the street, which is the only road that conveys traffic to Spring Trail, Cedarhurst Trail, Algonquin Trail, Mohawk Trail, and Pequot Trail. All those roads are privately owned.

Lakeview Terrace is built on a terrace that parallels the west bank of the Lake Zoar section of the Housatonic River. The neighborhood is situated along the northern end of the Lower Paugussett State Forest.

Decades ago, before local planning and zoning regulations were in effect, land in the Lakeview Terrace area was divided into many tiny building lots which were then developed with lakeside summer cottages. Over the years, most of those cottages were converted for year-round living.

The roads and stormwater drainage structures that served the area, however, were not upgraded as required for year-round living, with the result of the densely-built area now having substandard roads and drainage facilities that often have been in a state of disrepair. Road conditions have resulted in icing problems during the winter months, compromising the ability of emergency vehicles to travel through the area.

Although Lakeview Terrace is a private road, the town provides routine road maintenance and snow plowing to keep the road passable for emergency vehicles. Town assessment records list 144 property owners along Lakeview Terrace.

First Selectman Pat Llodra told the Lakeview Terrace area residents that bringing that street and drainage facilities up to modern standards would be a costly, complex, lengthy process.

Fred Hurley, town public works director, said that the high cost involved in physically improving Lakeview Terrace “does not fit well” into the town’s typical practice of billing the owners of local private roads for one-half of the cost of the construction materials that are needed to make road improvements.

To bring Lakeview Terrace up to physical standards in which stormwater drainage would be well-controlled would be a costly project, he said. “This is a complicated project,” he said.

Before any major improvements could be made to a publicly owned Lakeview Terrace, land surveys and property title research would be needed, he said. Also, the town would need to negotiate some land acquisitions with property owners, he said.

“It would take a number of years to fix the [road] situation,” he said, adding, though, that there would be a plan in hand which would result in an eventually greatly improved, publicly owned Lakeview Terrace.

According to some basic figures generated by the town engineering department, Lakeview Terrace improvements, which would be broken in six separate improvement projects to spread out the cost of the work, would cost a minimum of $335,000 for about 5,510 feet of roadway, plus drainage devices.

However, that work does not include possible land surveys, the installation of guardrailing, tree removal, and the potential removal of unforeseen subsurface ledge. The need to address such matters could push the cost of road improvements much higher, Mr Hurley said.

Town Attorney David Grogins said converting Lakeview Terrace into a public road would require a variety of legal work to transfer the street’s ownership to the town government.

Town Engineer Ronald Bolmer noted that there are many steep slopes alongside Lakeview Terrace where guardrailing would need to be installed as a public safety measure. There are trees that are immediately next to the road that would need to be removed, he said. The cost estimates for road improvements do not include expenses for removing rock ledge, he added.

David Bratz, town deputy public works director, said that a variety of construction work would be needed to improve Lakeview Terrace. The town’s cost estimates for the improvements are low estimates, he stressed.

The proposed six-segment improvement project for the street could be constructed in phases, with the work performed as funds become available, Mrs Llodra said. She termed the project “a very long-range plan.”

“We have a lot of issues that we’ll work through very carefully,” she said, adding she expects that town officials would meet with Lakeview Terrace area residents several times as the plans move forward.

Questions

In response to a question from a Lakeview Terrace area resident about how property owners would be billed for the town’s improvements to that street, Mrs Llodra said that when town officials realized how expensive it would be to improve the road to modern standards, they realized that a public/private cost sharing plan for such improvements is not realistic.

Consequently, town officials determined that the best prospects for road improvements would involve converting the road from private ownership to public ownership and then improving the street as a public road, she said.

Resident Mary Ann Jacob of 65 Mohawk Trail said she would support converting Lakeview Terrace from private to public ownership, with the town then assuming road improvement costs. Ms Jacob asked how long such a project might take.

Assuming that a consensus to make Lakeview Terrace a public road is reached by the people in that area, the town would proceed with the preliminary steps of land surveying and topographic map creation, Mrs Llodra said.

The overall project would be lengthy, “but we need a starting point,” Mrs Llodra said.

“There are many issues and challenges on that stretch of road…We have a long way to go…We have lots of hurdles…It will take many years,” she said.