LIVERMORE — Selectpersons unanimously voted Tuesday night to pay Manzer’s Fine Grade & Earthwork of Anson $394,749.82 to reconstruct the south end of River Road.
Chair Mark Chretien confirmed all unit prices would be the same as last year. The work will continue from where it ended last year and go to state Route 108, he noted.
It does not include the area washed out last week due to significant rainfall, Selectperson Jeremy Emerson stated.
The price includes $381,912.32 for road reclamation, $7,500 to replace four culverts and $5,337.50 for shoulder work near Barnyard All Terrain, a mud run park.
The shoulder is pretty wide there where people walk, Selectperson Scott Richmond noted. Building the road up, it will be one flat area, he added.
New Selectperson Joshua Perkins asked if any other company had put in a bid.
Manzer did the first section and said he would keep the same prices, Chretien replied.
“He was $50,000 less than anyone else last year,” Richmond noted.
“We haven’t seen prices come down in our special projects in the last year,” Selectperson Brett Deyling said. The company he works for does a lot of municipal work, puts out bids and hadn’t seen anything better.
The next time it will go out to bid, Chretien added.
New plow truck
Selectpersons also approved a four-year lease-purchase agreement with Androscoggin Bank for a highway plow truck that won’t be available for at least a year and a half.
The bank provided two options. Annual payments for the four-year plan would be $74,315.35 with 5.45% interest. The five-year plan would be $61,041.25 with 5.5% interest.
Interest rates had gone down once but the agreement couldn’t be signed because voter approval at the April 25 annual Town Meeting hadn’t been received, Chretien stated.
With a count of 115 to 61, up to $275,000 was authorized to purchase a new truck for the highway department.
A new truck can’t be ordered now, Richmond stated. It will be one, maybe two winters without the new truck, he added.
Chretien suggested the four-year option, noting the bank would like the first payment this July.
“For a truck we’re not going to have for two years?” Deyling asked.
“We can’t do first payment in July; there is no money in the budget this year,” Richmond said. “We still have one more payment left on the 2019 (truck). That’s why we did it this way, so we could get that paid off. We could do it the following year.”
The four-year plan was supported by Deyling. “After that we are going to want a new truck,” he stated. “We don’t want to have to be paying on a truck that is no longer providing service to the town.”
The goal is to purchase a new truck to replace one of the town’s three big trucks every five years, Richmond said.
It is going to take two years to get a truck, Chretien said. With global supply chain issues likely to be ongoing, he said it will be at least a year to get, then the body put on and all the head gear, he added.
Similar issues are being seen with the town’s new firetruck, Richmond noted. The timing for its production has changed several times. They don’t know when it will be, he said.
In other business, Chretien was elected board chair and Deyling vice chair.
Rod Newman was appointed to the Planning Board and Mike Berry was confirmed for Budget Committee.
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