Selectmen this week reiterated their intention not to pursue funding for an access road from Rockwood Road to the Freeman-Centennial School grounds this spring, saying they have to wait for the results of a traffic study to see if the road is needed.

That means the board won’t ask Town Meeting for an appropriation for the estimated $500,000 road this May, though if selectmen decide to pursue it they could seek approval for funds in the fall. About a half-dozen residents of the neighborhood of Ware Drive at­tended the selectmen’s meeting this past Monday night to ask questions about the access road, which resi­dents are leery of out of concerns about traffic and flooding. An engineering plan that town officials have put together shows eight house lots that could be built on town-owned land if the access road is constructed because it would provide frontage for the lots. In the past selectmen have said they could use the sale of the land to pay for building the road. But Selectman Rob Garrity called the concept plan “more of a daydream... than a plan” during the selectmen’s meeting this week. And Selectman Jim Lehan, board chairman, repeated the board’s pledge not to connect the access road to the end of Geneva Avenue, which would make the cul-de-sac neighborhood of Geneva Avenue, Malcolm Street, and Ware Drive a potential cut-through.

“Let me say it as clearly as I can: There is no intent to connect to Ge­neva or Malcolm,” Lehan said. Lehan said the idea of building such an access road was first pro­posed in 1987. It stems from con­cerns by public safety officials about traffic and access to the school. Lehan said the results from a traffic study probably won’t be avail­able until late summer. He also not­ed that selectmen have to determine if the town can legally use Bicenten­nial Park for a roadway, a point that Garrity picked up on.

“… We have a number of consid­erations, as Jim said. There’s the is­sue of Bicentennial Park legally. In 1976, when it was dedicated, what wasit dedicated for? That’s an im­portant

thing we need to find out. It takes a full legal review. Because if it’s parkland then we have to find10 other acres somewhere else to replace it, according to state rules,” Garrity said. “There’s the issue of the percing. Does it still perc? What’s the water table like? There’s the issue of funding. Can you fund the thing to build it? There’s so many issues that it’s not worth it at this time having a long discussion about it because we are so far away from making any sort of decision about it.”

But some residents have sug­gested that if the town does build the access road, then a future Board of Selectmen could decide to con­nect it to their neighborhood. “My view, at least as long as I have an opportunity to vote on it, we’re not going to Geneva or Mal­colm,”

Lehan said. “But I can’t speak, nor can any other member of this board speak, for what future needs may be.”

During the selectmen’s meeting Thursday, February 18, town public works director Remo “Butch” Vito noted that federal regulations may eventually require the town to build a traffic divider on Rockwood Road across the railroad tracks in Norfolk Center, which could mean that driv­ers leaving Ware Drive might be re­stricted to making a right turn only, away from the town center. Such a situation may lead town officials to connect the neighborhood with the as-yet-unbuilt access road.

Lehan addressed that matter with residents of the Ware Drive neighborhood this past Monday night. “There is an issue about our railroad tracks. And there’s a traf­fic flow consideration on those railroad tracks. And it’s a federal is­sue. And should we reach a certain level where we have to put a divider across those railroad tracks, that’s going to impact your road, your neighborhood. It’s going to make it only accessible from one direction, if we are required to do that,” Lehan said. “We don’t want to do that. We don’t plan to do that. But we may be required to do that. And if we are required, you’re going to come out of your neighborhood, and you’re going to have to take a right. And if you’re coming from Boardman Street, you’re going to have to go up to the roundabout, and turn around and come back to go down into your neighborhood. That’s what will hap­pen

if we have to put that divider [in]. Now will that happen? When will it happen? I have no idea. It isn’t going to happen right away. It isn’t going to happen now. It hasn’t been mandated to us. We don’t want to do it.

“But if in five years, that’s man­dated to another board, that’s sit­ting here, one of the considerations that you may have is, Do you want at that point in time another access into your neighborhood? You may, or you may not,” Lehan said.

Garrity noted that federal regu­lations allow towns to prevent trains from blowing their whistles when approaching a road crossing under certain circumstances. If the stan­dards aren’t met, though, the federal government requires that trains blow their whistles to alert nearby traffic of their approach. “This is all a condition of the whistle ban. If you don’t want the Geneva cut-through, they’ll have to stop doing the whistle ban, and we’ll have whistles there all morning and all night, for the train, the train crossing. So there are a lot of moving pieces here that can’t be, tonight, dealt with with any certainty,” Garrity said.

Lehan, upon hearing an ob­jection to the access road on the grounds that a future Board of Selectmen could connect it to the Ware Drive neighborhood, noted that the current selectmen could simply connect Geneva Avenue to the school grounds right now if they wanted. “Well sir, with all due respect, if the board wanted to access the school, the simple solution is to just extend Geneva. Just take Ge­neva and connect it into the road going around the school,” Lehan said. “That is the least expensive, and the simplest of solutions, something we can actually af­ford

to do. But this board doesn’t want to do that. We don’t want to disturb your neighborhood. We’re on your side here. Now the problem is we can’t commit for a board fiveor six years down the line. There may be a situa­tion

that none of us know about today, and more than likely none of us will be here to talk about at that point in time, and there’ll be three ladies and gentlemen sitting here that there’s some­thing that they need to address and they may very well consid­er putting that road through. I mean, we run that risk [in] ev­ery neighborhood, every street, every community in the town of Norfolk. That’s part of living in a community. Things change. And no one can guarantee you that it will stay the same forever. We can’t. And nor should we.”