Morristown tells Senate Transportation it faces $3.2M paving backlog, urges statewide pavement data and grant review

Morristown town officials told the Senate Transportation committee on Feb. 17 that the town faces a roughly $3.2 million backlog to bring poor and very poor paved roads up to standard and urged the state to help provide repeatable pavement-condition data and reconsider how grant programs serve small towns.

"Forty-two point four percent of our paved town highways are still in poor to very poor condition," said Doreen St. Anj, Morristown highway superintendent and road commissioner. She told senators the town has 92.13 miles of town highway, of which 36.8 miles are paved, and that paved maintenance is the municipality's largest recurring cost.

That condition assessment, performed by consultant GPI using a visual "windshield" inspection, showed a $3.2 million catch-up need for paving alone, St. Anj said. "If we pay roughly 4 miles a year, we can address all of our poor and very poor roads in four more years," she said, estimating roughly $800,000 a year to meet that pace.

Brent Raymond, Morristown town manager, told the committee the town has sought options to raise local revenue and is placing a local option tax (LOT) on the March ballot. "Conservatively, the town could raise $1,200,000 a year if all three classifications were approved by the voters," Raymond said, adding that the town expects to direct at least 75% of LOT revenue toward road infrastructure if voters approve it.

Committee members and presenters discussed how state grant programs do and do not reach towns like Morristown. St. Anj said the Class 2 roadways grant caps awards at $200,000 with a 30% town match (20% where a town adopts state standards and an MRTP map); she noted only about 41.85% of Morristown's paved roads are Class 2 and therefore eligible. "Less than half of our paved gross are actually Class 2," she said, adding that statewide only about 24.4% of town highway miles are Class 2 and therefore eligible for that program.

Officials told senators that the limited eligibility and competitive nature of other grants mean many paved miles rely solely on property-tax increases for funding. Morristown also described other assets and needs: roughly 70 miles of gravel roads, nine miles of sidewalks (about 1,100 feet replaced in 2025 with 600 feet still in poor condition), and 17 town-owned bridges, some of which need significant repair. A recent bid to paint one bridge returned a low bid of $286,000, while the Town Highway Structures program maximum award is $200,000 for typical projects.

Morristown and Lamoille County Planning Commission staff urged the committee to consider state-supported, repeatable pavement-condition surveys. "We lack capacity to provide pavement-condition data for towns," said Sasha Wallace, executive director of the Lamoille County Planning Commission. Wallace said LCPC does culvert and sidewalk inventories and runs a Transportation Advisory Committee (TAC) but does not currently have the resources to gather consistent pavement-condition metrics for multiple towns.

Jeremy Reed, chief engineer (agency of transportation), told the committee the state's approach is more instrumented — measuring roughness with a specialized vehicle — whereas the town's windshield assessment is a quicker, visual method, and the results are not directly comparable.

Senators pressed on options including better coordination of data gathering, negotiating state-level contracts with firms to reduce per-town cost, capturing available federal dollars, and whether enabling easier road discontinuance could be part of a strategy for towns with shrinking maintenance capacity. Town officials said discontinuance is legally and financially burdensome, requiring attorney work and title searches, and would be used only selectively.

Committee members asked other towns to come forward with similar data as lawmakers prepare language for the next transportation bill. The committee paused for a five-minute break at the end of the session.

What happens next: senators said the Morristown testimony underscores a broader need for standardized pavement data and a review of how state grant programs and revenue tools reach smaller towns. The committee encouraged more towns to present comparable inventories and condition assessments as it prepares the T bill.