MEXICO – Town roads figured prominently from beginning to end during Wednesday night’s selectmen’s meeting at the town office.

Moontide Festival Committee Chairman Eddie Shurtleff asked board permission to conduct a toll road fundraiser on the Mexico end of the Rumford-Mexico bridge on Main Street. During a toll road, drivers are asked to donate money into manned buckets in the median.

He didn’t want to do it on the Rumford side, he said, because that meant he’d have to go before Rumford selectmen and make the same request.

Shurtleff said the committee has raised $17,000 so far, but needs another $3,000 to order fireworks for this year’s return of the July Fourth and Moontide Water Festival fireworks that would be comparable to 2005. That was the last year the fireworks were displayed over the Androscoggin River reflection pool in Rumford.

Based on resident Matt Gallant’s advice, however, selectmen asked Shurtleff to hold the event on a straightaway at the other end of town by Big Daddy’s Car Wash to prevent traffic backups. Shurtleff said that was fine. The board voted 3-0 approving it, pending additional approval by police Chief Jim Theriault.

Selectmen then launched a lengthy discussion on the town’s proposed 2007-08 $3.36 million municipal budget, which included several minutes spent on town roads that need repair or major overhaul.

During a public session at the end of the three-hour meeting, residents Betty Barrett and Janice Lannon clashed with Selectman Reggie Arsenault over a recent board-approved traffic pattern change that made Hill Street a one-way road. Previously, drivers could ascend or descend Hill Street, but now they can only descend.

Barrett and Lannon live on streets off Hill Street and used that as a shortcut off Main Street to reach their homes. Arsenault said a few residents asked him to have the road use changed to protect a deaf resident who routinely walks through the area and cannot hear cars coming up the hill.

After Arsenault told them that selectmen held a public hearing on the matter, then voted to change the road’s use, the two women asked that another public hearing be held and be better advertised, because they weren’t the only ones upset with the change. Selectmen Chairwoman Barbara Laramee acquiesced, but didn’t set a date.