This year’s Board of Selectmen is as guilty as many previous Boards of deferring work on our roads and bridges in an effort to keep the tax rate down. The highway plan from 1994 to catch up and keep up with all our highway projects was essentially derailed by the recession. But now we have arrived at the point where deferring projects is no longer in the best interest of the Town, if we are to maintain the safety and condition of our roads and bridges.

Thankfully, interest rates are at historic lows, so much so that using a bond to catch up on many deferred road and bridge projects is now not only possible, but fiscally prudent.

Here are the issues as we see them:

• Costs of oil-based products go up every year, so the price of a paving project goes up accordingly.

• The longer road and bridge improvement is deferred, the more deterioration takes place, thereby increasing the cost of the project.

• Past practice of paving approximately one mile of road per year is the least cost-effective way to improve paved roads. Each year, the same mobilization costs are incurred, such that after 10 years, the Town has paid the cost of mobilizing paving equipment and materials 10 times over.

• Steve Liaikos, a retired senior DOT Bridge Engineer, met with the Board this summer and identified four bridges that will require improvement (Kearsarge Mountain Road, Mountain Brook on Elbow Pond Road, and Hall Farm Road) or removal (Gale Road) within the next two years or face bridge closure.

Deferring critical projects and/or handling them piecemeal no longer makes sense. We are proposing to bundle the bridge and road projects (excluding the Lawrence Street bridge) into one year – this year! – to save on mobilization costs and to realize discounted rates on a large paving project.

To do so, Town Meeting needs to authorize a $1,000,000 bond for road and bridge improvement so the Town can:

• Borrow up to $1,000,000 at an historically low interest rate. (We only expect to have to borrow about $750,000.)

• Bundle critical road projects to save money on mobilization costs

• Catch up on deferred projects, such as putting final coats on recent paving projects

• Avoid bridge closures by including four bridge projects

• Hire a “clerk of the works” to put the work out to bid and oversee the projects to assure quality of work and cost efficiency

• Finish ten years of work in one year, at this year’s prices, avoiding the cost increases that are sure to come

We anticipate that the payment on the bond will be about $158,000 per year for seven years. Because the bond will give us money for all the capital highway projects (except the Lawrence Street bridge) that are foreseeable for the next seven years, we should be able to make that $158,000 bond payment every year instead of the $100,000 to $150,000 per year that we usually budget for capital highway projects.

Therefore, the plan is for the bond to have little or no net impact on taxes. The impact everyone will see, however, is all the neglected Andover roads and bridges that get fixed in 2014 instead of those projects being spread over the coming seven years at a higher cost. Among the major projects on the list for 2014, if the bond is approved at Town Meeting, are:

• Monticello Drive

• Switch Road

• Shaw Hill Road

• Bay Road

• Kearsarge Mountain Road bridge

• Elbow Pond Road bridge

• Hall Farm Road bridge

• Gale Road bridge