[Note — this e-mail from Carol Morris of the Connections Study was forwarded to us by a recipient. We are posting it on Friday, July 16, but have edited the date of the post to make it show up in the correct chronological order in relation to other posts.]
[Begin message.]
From: carol morris [mailto:cmorris@morriscomm.net]
Sent: Wednesday, July 14, 2010 11:32 AM
To: Undisclosed-recipients:
Subject: Connections Study: Potential Meeting Change
All,
As you know, we have scheduled a combined Steering/Stakeholder Committee meeting for this Friday at 10 am at Kittery Trading Post. The purpose of the meeting is to update you on progress towards completing the draft report and to provide you, in as much as is possible, with information on the content of the report. The report itself needs to be reviewed and approved by both DOTs before it can be released.
Please read this entire message and respond to the question we have asked at the close of the email.
Maine and New Hampshire DOTs have been meeting and talking over the past weeks, and progress has been made: The list of proposed alternatives is now proposed to be reduced from ten to five.
No longer on the table are any of the Sarah Mildred Long Bridge replacement alternatives that would be built on-alignment. The DOTs agreed that the benefits of being able to keep traffic on the existing bridge during construction of a new bridge off-alignment would be significant. This takes Alternatives 5a and 5b out of contention.
Also off the table are the three Sarah Mildred Long Bridge alternatives that are four lanes. The new Hybrid alternative provides sufficient capacity to replace these through the 2035 Study Period; all of the two-lane Sarah Mildred Long options could be expanded to four lanes should the need arise in the more distant future.
All alternatives off the table still require full documentation and approval of that documentation.
This means that the five alternatives remaining are:
Alternative #4: Memorial Bridge Replacement and Sarah Mildred Long Rehab on alignment
Alternative #6a: Memorial Bridge Replacement and Sarah Mildred Long Low-Level Replacement off-alignment
Alternative #9: Memorial Bridge Replacement and Sarah Mildred Long Hybrid (Hybrid alternative is off-alignment)
Alternative #10: Memorial Bridge Bike/Ped Only and Sarah Mildred Long Hybrid
Alternative #11: Memorial Bridge Removed with Bike/Ped Transit and Sarah Mildred Long Hybrid
Some of these alternatives are favored by MaineDOT and some are favored by New Hampshire DOT, but we have not yet reached agreement as to which could be favored by both DOTs.
In addition, there are other areas where consensus has not yet been reached, and this means that the preliminary report to be delivered to the DOTs this Friday will have some holes. A significant issue is the question of costs. While it is clear that some of the alternatives will have lower costs than others, there have been change and adjustments to the cost estimates over the past months, and development of a cost estimate for the Hybrid bridge and refinement of the cost estimates for the other alternatives is still ongoing. Since this is a critical criterion, further consensus cannot be achieved until cost estimates have been fully accepted by both DOTs. There are also some outstanding comments regarding environmental and other impacts that need to be completed and presented to the two DOTs.
Finally, I know many of you will have questions about the application for TIGER II. This is a decision that will be reached outside of the study process and we will likely have no new information for you this Friday. The pre-application deadline has been moved out to July 26th.
Given all of this, our question is: Do you want to meet on Friday or is this summary of Study status sufficient? While this is a topic of very strong interest to all of you, your time is valuable (perhaps more so on a Friday in July) and we do not want you to feel compelled to meet if we have a minimum of new information.
Please let me know your opinion ASAP. If we have a handful of folks who have questions but most do not feel the need to meet, we can also set up a conference call for the same time period if that would be more convenient.
Please accept our apologies for this last minute potential change.
[End of message.]