Ellsworth defers completion of road project

ELLSWORTH – Almost a year and a half after the City Council voted to pave all of Winkumpaugh Road, a 3-mile section of the rural road near Dedham still remains unpaved.

According to Michelle Beal, the city’s finance director and former acting city manager, it may be a while before the western end of the road is widened and covered with asphalt. The eastern end of the road is paved.

“I think it was put on the back burner,” Beal said Thursday. “It’s not on the list for 2005 projects.”

Beal said that after the council’s December 2002 vote, then-City Manager Tim King met with Winkumpaugh Road residents to discuss the project. She said many residents were opposed to the idea because areas of the unpaved section would have to be widened to be brought up to city standards before it could be paved.

“There was discussion on that and I think it got dropped because of Tim leaving,” she said. King left his post as city manager last June. Stephen Gunty started work as Ellsworth’s city manager last month.

The road improvement projects the city has listed as priorities over the next three years are Gary Moore Road, Lincoln Street, Holt Avenue and Argonne Street, according to Beal.

The first mile of Gary Moore Road, off Route 180, is scheduled to be rebuilt this summer at a cost of $274,000, she said. Other portions of the road will be improved over the next couple of years.

The city has reallocated $90,000 that it had set aside as the local share of planned state improvements to the intersection of Oak and State streets, Beal said. The money has gone back into Ellsworth’s local roads account because the state Department of Transportation is not sure when it will improve the intersection, the finance director said.

“That has been put off indefinitely,” she said.

The city’s share of a state project to widen the northern end of High Street has been set aside and will not be reallocated, even though that state project also has been delayed, Beal said. She said concerns historians have had about preserving three properties on High Street have been resolved between DOT and the Maine Historic Preservation Commission.

Utility work on the High Street project, of which Ellsworth will pay $185,000 of the overall $3.5 million cost, should get under way this fall, she said.