BETHEL – A long-awaited snowmobile bridge is about to become reality thanks to the state transportation agency and $1 million in federal funds.

At 7 p.m. Tuesday, Nov. 25, at the Crescent Park School cafeteria on Mason Street, the Maine Department of Transportation will conduct a public meeting on construction of a new pedestrian-bicycle bridge across the Androscoggin River.

The bridge, slated to be sited adjacent to the Route 2 bridge, will consist of a 10-foot-wide by 400-foot-long span, said project manager Andy MacDonald.

The bridge will be built 10 feet wide to accommodate snowmobile club grooming machines in the winter.

“It’s a serious bridge, not like something over Cripple Creek,” said Town Manager Scott Cole.

Cole said that both Maine House District 65 Rep. Arlan R. Jodrey, R-Bethel, and former District 24 Sen. Norman K. Ferguson Jr., R-Hanover, lobbied to help get the bridge project included in the 2001 transportation bond.

“Except for the Route 2 bridge, there is no reliable crossing over the Androscoggin,” he added.

MacDonald took it a step further and said there was no reliable, safe crossing over the river in Bethel. That’s why they gave the project top priority.

“The Bethel bridge on Route 2 is on a curve and it’s super elevated,” MacDonald said Wednesday afternoon. “And the side that snowmobiles cross on is on the high side and snowmobiles don’t handle pavement well. When (Sunday River Ski Resort) traffic is emptying out,” the bridge isn’t safe to cross.

He said that last winter, a local snowmobiler proved that point to him, taking him on a ride across the bridge in traffic and the snowmobile ended up in the travel lane.

MacDonald said the project isn’t termed a snowmobile bridge though because of the federal enhancement funds being used to construct the crossing.

“It originally started out as a snowmobile bridge that was underfunded. But we had to go after enhancement funds in federal dollars, which do not allow for motorized vehicles except for wheelchairs,” he added.

But government officials are aware that the pedestrian-bicycle bridge will be used to provide a safe snowmobile crossing in the winter.

That’s why the town of Bethel must draft an ordinance allowing snowmobiles to use the bridge before the project goes out to bid and construction begins in late spring or early summer next year.

“This is uncharted territory for us to come up with a snowmobile ordinance, but it’s a new kind of funding and the town has to demonstrate a reasonable access policy that meets the constitutional and regulatory standards for snowmobiles,” Cole said.

“But it will get done,” he added, noting that selectmen don’t have to convene a special town meeting to pass the ordinance. They are likely to hold a public meeting on the matter for local input, though.

MacDonald expects that Bethel, which is slated to take ownership of the bridge when it’s completed, will try to link it to their existing walkway trail system and look at creating a larger pedestrian-bicycle network to the Sunday River resort in neighboring Newry.

MacDonald doesn’t anticipate project completion until the spring of 2005.

tkarkos@sunjournal.com

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