Selectmen Plan for Access Road from Rockwood Road to School

Selectmen plan to pursue building an ac­cess road from Rockwood Road to the elemen­tary school grounds on Boardman Street, but they don’t intend to connect the road to an existing neighborhood southwest of the school.

Selectmen made the decision this past Thurs­day to continue preparations to build the road, which would need approval from Town Meeting and assurances that the deed to the town-owned property would allow a road to be built, said Se­lectman Jim Lehan. A brief in last week’s issue of the newspaper suggested that the town could build the access road with the $36.9 million appropriation to build a new elementary school to replace Freeman-Cen­tennial School, but town officials say it’s unlikely they can do that legally and that in an event they have no intentions of doing so. Leo Bedard, chairman of the Norfolk School Building Committee, noted in an interview this week that the Massachusetts School Building Au­thority ordered local officials to take the access road out of the school project budget. To use school building funds, the School Building Authority would have to approve the ac­cess road as part of the school project sometime in the future, which would only happen if the au­thority considered the road an integral part of the school project. The school project appropriation would also have to have a surplus near the end of construction. The town’s School Building Committee has no plans to make such a case to the state and doesn’t plan to pursue building the access road on its own, Bedard said.

“From a School Building Committee perspec­tive, it’s not in our scope, it’s not in our budget, it’s not something we’re doing,” Bedard said. “Our building design will accommodate the future ad­dition of a road. We’re not putting an impassable object in the route. “… All we’ve committed to do is to share our design with the town and have it so that if they want it, we will coordinate our design with the town’s long-term plan for a road if they want to do it. … We’re not restricting future growth for the town.” One likely way to pay for the access road, which has been estimated to cost $500,000, would be to sell town-owned land that the access road would provide frontage for. An engineering plan pre­pared for the town’s Department of Public Works shows eight buildable lots on town-owned land that could be created if the access road is built through the town-owned property.

But Lehan emphasized in an interview Thurs­day that even if the town builds the road the town won’t connect it to the end of Geneva Avenue, which would leave the neighborhood of Ware Drive, Malcolm Street, and Geneva a cul-de-sac.

“There is no intent to connect this to Geneva or Malcolm,” Lehan said Thursday. “… Our view as of this morning, and we’re all in consensus on this, is our purpose isn’t to create a traffic flowthrough that community. Our purpose is to con­nect to the school.”

The proposed access road has drawn opposi­tion from residents in that area, out of concerns about increased traffic and also because they worry that more houses in the area would worsen flooding.