Selectmen were hoping to convene a special town meeting on Child Hollow Road.
By Terry Karkos
Staff Writer

DIXFIELD – Two weeks was long enough for three of five selectmen to decide where they stood on a road issue.

Board Chairman Hugh Daley, Eugene Skibitsky and Stephen Donahue opted Monday night not to raise a motion calling for a special town meeting to vote on accepting the private Child Hollow Road as a town way.

The move all but shot down efforts to have the board convene the special town meeting on the gravel road, which was built to town standards.

But that didn’t seem good enough to the three selectmen who interpreted the town’s confusing and ambiguous Private Road Design and Construction Standards Ordinance to mean that Child Hollow Road must be paved before the town could vote to accept it.

“You can’t bring it to the town until it’s brought to standard,” Skibitsky told Ronda Palmer, who is building a house with her husband off the gravel road that Holt Hill Road resident Robert Child constructed.

Resident Don St. Germain argued the opposite, that the ordinance doesn’t specify that a road must be a paved surface to be accepted as a town way.

“This is a poor ordinance throughout,” St. Germain said. “The person that built that road went out of his way to make sure he built it within town standards.”

Daley even admitted that selectmen “can’t hold the builder of the road to town standards when even I don’t know what they are.”

But, despite saying that he saw nothing wrong with the road when he visited it during the two weeks since the previous board meeting, Daley still believed that the road had to be paved.

“The ordinance is there to protect the town. The road must be hot-topped or I won’t vote to bring it to a special town meeting. We must watch out for the other residents of this town. It’s their ordinance and I’ll uphold it,” Skibitsky said.

He did, however, join Daley and say that he felt very bad about misinformation given Child by town officials regarding town standards as the road was being built.

When Palmer said Child had gotten a runaround by the Planning Board and other town officials, Planner Ralph Clarke objected, providing minutes of the board’s January 2003 meeting with Child and Palmer.

“She didn’t get a runaround,” Clarke said. “The Planning Board got a request to waive the 50-foot right of way and we said we didn’t have the authority to grant an appeal or variance from the town ordinance.”

Clarke said there was no request made at that meeting to not have the road accepted as a gravel road.

In the end, Daley tabled discussion once again to the board’s next meeting on Dec. 22 when he expected the other two board members to be present. They were absent due to illness, he added.

tkarkos@sunjournal.com

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