Your Man in Berlin, Tree City USA As the first quarter of 2019 draws to a close (already?), it was a busy week of planning meetings with both local organizations—Town Hall Theater, ACTR, the Selectboard—and the VTrans project team. Every week I meet for half a day with the project leaders at VTrans, Kubricky, and VHB. These meetings provide me with information on project plans that I then share with you and with key stakeholders downtown. They also give me a weekly opportun

Launch Pit Skating Rink, Heads Up on Pop-Ups Excavators and cranes wintering over in Printer’s Alley swung into action on Monday as the ECI crew returned to town and began the final phase of work on the new downtown stormwater system. The first order of business is clearing several feet of ice and water that accumulated in the Launch Pit during the past six weeks. Once that’s done (and I think we’ve probably all heard that more snow arrives on Friday and Saturday), ECI can g

Snow, Spring? Box Elders As Wednesday night’s snowfall turned to Spring-like temperatures on Thursday, the tree clearing in the rail corridor that got underway late last week continued its steady progress south toward Cross Street Bridge. As you will have noticed if you’ve driven into the Marble Works in the past few days, much of the first few days’ work involved clearing trees, primarily box elders, along the rail line between County Tire and Middle Seymour Street (the back

Tree Clearing Underway at North End of Project The 2019 construction season got underway as planned on Thursday morning, in weather that Vermonters like to call “bracing,” with a day of tree clearing at the north end of the project. Much of the first day’s work focused on clearing trees and brush that line the rail corridor at the back entrance to the Marble Works on Middle Seymour Street. Tree removal in this area will serve a dual purpose, clearing the way for reconstructi

Tree Clearing To Get Underway This Week As was the case last March, the first sign of construction activity this year will be a clearing of trees that line the rail corridor in downtown Middlebury. Their removal will clear the way for Kubricky to install new Town water, sewer, and sanitary lines in the railroad right of way later this Spring. The work will be performed by Trees Incorporated out of Rutland and will get underway with survey activity in the rail corridor on Wed

Looking Ahead to Spring It’s been four weeks now since construction shut down for the winter, though the chain-link fences and construction vehicles “wintering over” in Printer’s Alley and Triangle Park are a daily reminder that we are still a town in the midst of a construction project. That project will start up again later in March as Kubricky and ECI return to complete work on the drainage system. Then as summer arrives the focus will shift to replacing town water and se