LIVERMORE FALLS – Selectmen voted Monday to order discontinuance of Pasture Lane off Route 133 near the Wayne line.
The article will be one of 50 to go before voters at 7 p.m. Wednesday, June 15, at Murray Hall.
If voters approve the order, it would eliminate the town’s obligation to maintain, repair or plow the road, but the town would maintain a public easement over the 50-foot-wide, 600-foot-long road.
The selectmen set a $1 limit on damages for each of the two abutters of the road.
Selectmen also voted Monday to have the Foundry Road gated from dusk to dawn. The road runs down behind the municipal building, along the recreation field and by the wastewater treatment plant.
The existing signs say the road is a gated road and not a through way.
Police normally lock the gates on the road during the night, and it is reopened in the morning.
Emergency personnel and water and sewer department authorities all have keys to the gate, Town Manager Alan Gove said.
Selectman Bill Demaray said that two or three years ago, selectmen voted to put up the gated road signs to prevent vandalism to the recreation field and speeding along the road, specifically during evening hours.
In other business, resident Herb Robinson said he has had trouble with pollution of his well at his Strickland Loop property after the town stopped using sand on the roads during winter months and went to treating the roads with salt and calcium chloride.
Runoff from the road is running through a hole in the road’s blacktop and onto his property.
Robinson said his family hasn’t been able to drink the water from the well since the town started the new road treatment. He has had the well pumped and cleaned out and is looking for some preventive maintenance on the road, he said.
Selectman Russell Flagg said the state is coming out with a report that indicates there are some problems associated with using salt and liquid calcium chloride to treat the roads.
Flagg said he would like the issue to be brought up at a future selectmen’s meeting for discussion.
It is “my opinion” and not the board’s opinion, Flagg said, that the town could use salt in areas where there is public water, sewer and drainage, and sand on the outskirts of town where people have wells.
In other action, selectmen appointed Ken Jones as fire chief and Jim Leclerc as assistant fire chief. The Livermore Falls firefighters association elected Jones and Leclerc to the positions.
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