Town Public Works Director Fred Hurley slowed his “company car,” an aging town-owned minivan, down to a crawl as he weaved and bucked across seemingly endless clusters of bumps, heaves, and potholes that appear to take up more road surface than any stretch of unbroken asphalt covering streets in several local lakeside communities.

As he toured the Cedarhurst, Riverside, Alpine, Shady Rest, and Pootatuck Park neighborhoods with The Newtown Bee, Mr Hurley talked about the prospect of finally getting the revenue required to make substantial, long-term repairs to many of these and other town roads under a capital planning proposal in the municipal budget next fiscal year.

On April 20, selectmen agreed to form a “Committee for Policy & Planning for Town Roads” that will include residents, town officials, and key staffers — under the leadership of Mr Hurley, and Legislative Council Chair Mary Ann Jacob. The panel will ultimately advise and answer to selectmen.

As a resident of the private Cedarhurst community, Ms Jacob is empathetic to residents of both hers and other lakeside neighborhoods, many of which were or are under the control of private residents’ associations.

The ad-hoc committee will soon begin addressing concerns of residents townwide who are fed up with deteriorating local roadways, by advising on how best to spend both increased operating dollars in the Highway Department budget for roads, as well as $3 million that will be bonded in the coming years to supplement and fast-track work on the worst road surfaces in town.

At the same time, the panel will tackle an issue that has challenged the town for nearly half a century — bringing heavily traveled but poorly maintained private roads into the town’s public road system.

During the April 20 meeting, Mrs Llodra explained that in 1968, the town pledged to maintain private roads to ensure safe emergency vehicle access to all residents in four of those lakeside neighborhoods. In turn, related association groups pledged to pay 50 percent of all materials costs back to the town for any major improvements Newtown undertook in those areas to ensure emergency access.

“Today, we no longer have four [viable associations], we have two — and they are struggling to get resources to do any major road repairs,” Mrs Llodra said. “We need some help.”

Ms Jacob said besides the roadways in the four association neighborhoods, there are more than 100 random private roads that nobody ever compensated the town to maintain.

The first selectman said since Newtown has a “moral and ethical obligation to keep our people safe,” she has supported strategic spending on public improvements in the Lakeview neighborhood, which began three years ago and is nearly completed.

Mrs Llodra said by empowering an ad-hoc research and advisory panel, selectmen will get good input about how to make the best use of new and added road repair funding that will improve public safety access for everyone.

Mr Hurley agreed with the concept.

“If handled correctly,” Mr Hurley told selectmen, “we could save a lot of money. In the long-term, it’s more cost-effective to fix these roads than to do the band-aiding we’ve been doing.”

Ms Jacob pointed out that the program will also enhance environmental protections by reducing non-point source pollution and runoff into local waterways.

Mrs Llodra replied, “I think we’re going to invest a lot of money and I’m ok with that. We’ll have the committee go forward, do the research, then start prioritizing. It’s a big task, but this is a starting point.”

The first selectman anticipates bringing a mix of representatives to the panel along with advisors from Public Works and the town’s Land Use Department.

Mr Hurley told The Bee during the neighborhood tours that the first concerted efforts to begin bringing private roads under town control began during the administration of Zita McMahon, but that effort was unsuccessful. Another attempt was made by former first selectman Herb Rosenthal.

“But these former lake communities used to be under the control of local associations. Today there are few organizations still acting in that capacity,” Mr Hurley said. “So the town went from trying to work on a large scale with these associations, to having to deal and negotiate with dozens of individual property owners.”

In those cases, an attempt to secure an entire roadway with a dozen residences on it could be thwarted by a single property owner who opposed or refused to participate in the land transfer.

Mrs Llodra said that the 1968 policy the town adopted has “timed out.”

“It’s been nearly half a century and we have not been successful in our efforts,” she added. “It’s time to do something different.”