BERLIN – Town leaders approved updates to Berlin’s stormwater priorities at a meeting this week.
On Monday, the Berlin Town Council voted unanimously to remove a Bottle Branch stormwater project from the town’s list of priorities. The adjustment came at the request of Town Administrator Laura Allen, who will forward what is now a four-project priority list to the county.
“At some future date we’ll bring it back and reintroduce another collection of projects but by establishing these as the priority you’ll enable us to go ahead and get this information into the Worcester County Hazard Mitigation Plan,” she said.
Allen initially brought town officials a priority list of Tier 2 stormwater improvement projects last year. The list included five projects, the last of which was meant to target Bottle Branch at Decatur Street.
“It’s unlikely that we’ll get to Project 5, which is Bottle Branch at Decatur Street, for at least five, maybe 10 years,” Allen said. “What we have is an issue with a property owner who saw this PowerPoint presentation in a council packet and has expressed some concerns about the project and has an interest in working with the town more closely on the design.”
She said the town was in the pro-cess of asking the county to incorporate its stormwater projects into the Worcester County Hazard Mitigation Plan. In the interest of getting the list into the county’s plan, she proposed deleting Project 5 for now, as a portion of it would have been on the concerned property owner’s land.
Allen said getting the stormwater priorities into the county’s plan could help the town attract more grant funding.
“This is important because when FEMA looks to fund stormwater projects, they look to the county’s hazard mitigation plan and the challenge we’re having currently is there’s not enough information, specific information on specific projects in the plan, to really entice being able to support it,” she said.
Removing the Bottle Branch at Decatur project, the list would include Hudson Branch along Pine, Franklin, Grice and Nelson streets, Hudson Branch at Bottle Branch Road, Bottle Branch at Henry’s Mill and Henry’s Green and Bottle Branch at West Street and Abbey Lane.
Mayor Gee Williams said the issue being considered Monday was simply the removal of what had been considered Project 5. He said the town could have its stormwater engineer come in and field questions about the other projects.
“Quite frankly it won’t all work until it’s all done,” he said. “We don’t want to make the problem worse before we make it better.”
