AVON — Almost a year after a vote that divided the town, construction on Old Farms Road is now underway, starting a conversation among Avon residents on whether the change is wanted or needed for the town.
In December, 1,330 residents approved Phase 1 of the $5.5 million project — 1,018 voted against the measure — that will cover approximately 1,700 linear feet of roadway from the intersection of Thompson and Scoville roads.
The project aims to transform the scenic, narrow road notorious for car crashes and speeding into something safer for drivers and pedestrians.
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"It’s beautiful," said Town Engineer Lawrence Baril. "It’s also fairly unsafe."
By the project's completion, which is scheduled for December 2025, residents can expect a wider roadway, intersection improvements at Thompson Road, a roundabout at Scoville Road and a multi-use trail nearby. Additionally, the project requires a land swap between the town and Avon Old Farms School due to the relocation of approximately 180 feet of road owned by the private school.
But some residents who drive on Old Farms Road every day say they are "heartbroken."
"It's the character of Avon that's changing," said Heather Satlof, who has lived in Avon for 20 years.
She said she has been taking video on her drive home lately so she can remember how the road used to be. "If I've had a stressful day, I drive through those woods and it's decompressing."
Her drive down the windy, woodsy road is her happy place, and she's just said to see that go, Satlof said. "But anyway, there's nothing I can do to stop it," she added.
But some residents are still finding ways to fight back, even as construction begins.
The construction contractor began moving equipment to the site for the first stage of the project two weeks ago, Baril said. The first step is tree clearing, he said, in which the contractor will be "clearing and grubbing" the vegetation that would be in the way of the roadwork.
But, residents have the ability to request a public hearing about the tree removal, and have done so already, Baril said. That hearing has not been scheduled yet, but will impact the timeline slightly, and Baril suspects the tree clearing won’t take place until the middle or latter part of November.
While some of the tree removal may be delayed, work on other aspects will continue as planned, including on drainage crossings and earthmoving, in which dirt is taken from one place and moved to another, then compacted so it becomes the new roadway, Baril said.
At the end of the project, Old Farms Road will be 26 feet wide, with 11-foot travel lanes and two foot shoulders, he said. Currently, the roadway is somewhere between 22 and 28 feet wide, as its width varies throughout, Baril said.
But many of the long-time residents opposed to the project see these plans as not only impacting a single road, but changing the very fabric of Avon.
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"Avon used to be a small New England town," said resident Kiren Cooley Bump. "The reworking of Old Farms is just one more kind of a nail in the coffin."
She said she thinks widening the road will bring in much more commercial traffic, and is for more of a commerce decision than anything else, making the road worse, not better.
"And it's not that I'm against updating things, but I think you also have to have enough awareness to say is this in concert and context? Are there any other solutions?" Bump said.
And while the driving force behind these changes is safety, Bump said she still doesn't think it will make a difference.
"You're not doing it because people are speeding and the road is too narrow, because they're still going to speed," she said. "But you're not actually doing anything to address the speeding issue. Put in speed tables."
But Baril said that a main goal of this project from the start was to improve traffic and the speeding issue. Town officials said in May that in the last seven years, there have been 135 reported accidents with 19 injuries on Old Farms Road, and there have been numerous other incidents that weren't reported.
"I understand why people are concerned about, you know, this is a rural country road and you're changing it," Baril said. "But you have to manage the potential for accidents. That’s part of what our job is."
But Satlof felt that if people would just drive the speed limit, that would fix the safety issue. "I think my bigger problem is people who know the road don't speed on it," she said.
It's the residents who use the road most often and actually appreciate it that will have to deal with the changes, she said.
But Tarah Monday, who has lived in Avon for about three years, said while she understood both sides, she felt like this project was needed and was glad it was happening.
As someone who didn't grow up driving on that road, Monday said her first few times on Old Farms Road were terrifying. "It is so narrow and windy," she said. "It just isn't safe."
She said she also felt like there was a lot of pushback from a small contingent that perhaps lived in that area, didn't want to deal with the construction, or have lived here forever and just wanted it to stay pretty.
"I think there's a vocal minority that wants to make it an issue and that is kind of reflective of just the culture at large," Monday said. "But I think that it wouldn't have made it through the referendum if that was the majority of opinion."
But that didn't mean she wasn't sympathetic to the idea of people being resistant to aesthetic change, she said.
"I get it, you pay taxes to live in a beautiful place and have that charm, but it has to be balanced with public safety in a way that makes sense," she said. "And it's not coming out of taxpayer money. So it really is the opportune time to do it."
The project is funded through grants and $360,000 already set aside in the town's capital improvement projects budget. Town officials said it would have no impact on taxpayers, and was necessary to accommodate the thousands of motorists a day who use it as a connector between routes 44 and 10.
While he expects traffic to improve in the long run, while construction is underway, residents should prepare for an impact, Baril said.
No detours or complete closures are expected in 2024, Baril said, but residents should expect delays as tree work begins, with possible alternating traffic as construction workers will be working on the side of the road.
Eventually, when construction begins on the three intersections that will be rebuilt, including a new roundabout, full detours will be implemented, Baril said. But those will be noticed long in advance, he added.
Some residents have also voiced concerns that the project would be completely straightening out the roadway. However, Baril said that was not the case. "It's going to have curve to it. It's going to have both up and downhill curve as well as side by side curve," he said.
Baril said Old Farms Road was going to look different, and trees would no longer be directly on the edge of the road. But, they have a plan in place to revegetate what they take down to a degree that makes it safe, and retain the road's character the best they could, he said.
"You have to trust that we're trying to do the right thing on all accounts," he said. "It's the balancing act of trying to keep something as rural as possible and yet safe for people to drive on."
The North and South section of the Old Farms Road project should be completed in late 2025, but of course, Baril said, that’s depending on many factors, including weather.
Right now, a winter shutdown is scheduled from Dec. 1 to March 30, but the contractor has indicated that they will work on the project as long as the weather allows, as they aim to complete the project ahead of schedule.
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