Town officials recently laid new sewer and water lines beneath what will be a new section of Route 116.
Guilford B. Mooring, Amherst public works superintendent, stands where Route 116 will be located at Atkins Corner when the reconfiguration of the intersection there will be completed.AMHERST – Talk about redesigning the traffic flow at Atkins Corner began sometime in the last century.
Since then, there have been hundreds of hours spent on designs, meetings, discussions and negotiations about land takings and land swaps for the South Amherst project, and now the preliminary work has begun.
The piles of dirt and the removal of apple trees and buildings are the visual cues that change is coming. The redesign is intended to improve safety and traffic flow with the use of roundabouts at West Street and West Bay Road, and at West Street and Bay Road. The road will be slightly wider.
Town officials recently laid new sewer and water lines beneath what will be the new section of Route 116, now a dirt road to the east of Atkins Country Market. Crews have removed a storage shed and three other buildings. Now only a boarded up rental house owned by Atkins remains. The state will raze that, said Department of Public Works Superintendent Guilford B. Mooring.
Mooring said the town finished its work about two weeks ahead of schedule this spring.
The state will advertise the project June 12 with bid opening Aug. 17, according to Adam L. Hurtubise, spokesman for the state Department of Transportation.
Mooring said the earliest that work on the road could begin would be August. The project is expected to take about two years. In the meantime, town crews will loam and seed the area to stabilize it until work begins.
Dorothy A. Ives, who lives in a farmhouse near the project, has had a bet with Mooring that she wouldn’t live to see it completed. Mooring said he wins, but Ives, 92, said, “I’m still not holding my breath.”
Ives moved to the house with her husband in 1944 to live with her father-in-law. Her father-in-law told them about state plans to straighten the road then, and stakes were put in a pasture on the farm, which now belongs to Hampshire College.
She remembers the meetings in the 1970s about plans to make the area a neighborhood center. “I feel like Methuselah” she said.
The project is funded with $2.4 million in stimulus money and approximately $5 million from other federal and state sources.
Because the road is new, the work will likely not impede traffic in the area, Mooring said. And the state will not be able to work on certain parts of it during the school year.
Atkins, meanwhile, is building a new shed behind the current building and is planning to add a 2,062-square-foot front sales area as well as enlarge and reconfigure its parking lot.
The sewer and water lines, which extend to Country Corners Road, will be able to accommodate additional development, Mooring said.