SOUTHWICK — With the town needing to hire a new DPW director and the prospect of asking Town Meeting to authorize up to $20 million for road repairs, Select Board member Russell Anderson suggested hiring a new vendor that can assess the condition of every road in town using artificial intelligence.
“It would be a perfect time to do this,” Anderson said during the board’s last meeting.
“With the transition to the next DPW director, that person could walk in and have a full report of every road and its condition and how to move forward,” he added.
While the town has yet to post the opening, the current DPW Director Randy Brown started a new job on July 9 as the Westfield DPW director.
Anderson said he had recently attended a webinar hosted by a company that offers a service similar to what the DPW currently uses for pavement management — BETA — but creates reports that provide much more detail.
While the current company, BETA, has technicians visit the town and visually inspect and grade the condition of the town’s 85 miles of roads and streets, the company Anderson suggested can get all the data it needs by using a cell phone mounted inside a vehicle that records as it travels the roads.
When finished, the recording is downloaded into a computer, which analyzes the data using AI.
Anderson said that unlike the data BETA provides, which focuses only on road conditions, the company he suggested maps everything along each road, including traffic signs and signals, fire hydrants, trees that might need to be trimmed, and line marking conditions before making recommendations on repairs.
“It seems to be well worth it,” said Anderson after Select Board member Diane Gale asked him the cost, which is $12,000 for the first year, and $9,000 going forward.
Select Board member Doug Moglin, while saying that BETA now might offer a similar service, said a different provider could offer new insights.
“It might be time to have a fresh look at the road conditions out there…especially if you’re going to do a bonding [bill],” Moglin said.
Last year, Moglin threw out the idea of going to Town Meeting and asking for authorization to borrow $20 million to try and tackle the deteriorating conditions of many of the town’s streets and roads.
“I don’t think we should be bonding $20 million without a second opinion,” Anderson said, which Moglin agreed to, “one hundred percent.”
“You can’t go in front of taxpayers and say we’re going to spend $5 million a year for the next four years [without a new assessment of the roads’ conditions],” Moglin said.
Gale asked about the $12,000 that would be needed to contract with the service.
Everyone agreed the money could be “carved out” of this year’s DPW budget, but also agreed to continue forward using the suggestions made by Brown for road repairs a couple of weeks ago during a board meeting.
However, Gale didn’t want to wait to start assessing the roads’ conditions.
“I would not want to want until next year. Let’s get it done now to prepare for what we’re going to do next year,” she said.
Anderson said if a new assessment is done, the new DPW director would have it as a reference for next year’s budget season.
The town’s Chief Administrative Officer Nicole Parker was tasked with researching the company Anderson suggested and comparing it to what BETA now offers.
Earlier in the meeting, Moglin said, as he’s said before, that there are roads in town that haven’t been “touched” in 50 or 60 years, like in the Fernwood and Birchwood neighborhoods.
Neither neighborhood was high on the list of road repair projects Brown provided to the board. Milling and repaving both and updating the drainage system is estimated to cost roughly $1 million.
The board will be touring the town’s roads in the next week or so before they decide on which projects to fund this year using the $1.45 million available.
At the top of the list is using $910,000 of the available funds to complete Phase 2 of the Ed Holcomb Road project and Phase 3 of the Gargon Terrace project.
