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Highway update: board weighs repairing Freightliner vs. funding replacement, rewrites grant to lower cost
Summary
The highway foreman reported a 2019 Freightliner required about $18,000 of outside repairs plus in-house work; board discussed setting aside $25,000–50,000 to smooth future truck purchases and agreed to rewrite a Better Back Roads grant request from concrete to stone to fit a $20,000 funding category.
The highway update centered on equipment reliability and a pending grant rewrite. Speaker 5 described fall maintenance preparations and said one 2019 Freightliner required approximately $18,000 in outside repairs before additional in-house work; board members raised concerns about increasing downtime and long lead times for new trucks (up to two years). Mike Dahl and others recommended beginning to set aside larger amounts in the equipment replacement fund — estimates discussed ranged from $25,000 to $50,000 this year — to avoid sharply increasing taxpayer impacts when a purchase is needed.
Separately, Speaker 5 said a hydraulic engineering recommendation called for concrete headwalls and wing walls for the Sportsman's/Student's Drive intersection, but the grant program manager advised the town to replace concrete with stone to qualify for a lower-cost 'category b' grant. "He wanted me to rewrite it so that it didn't have the concrete so we would just have stone head walls... so it came in around 20-ish," Speaker 5 reported. The board agreed to submit a revised $20,000 application to improve the town's chance of winning funding.
