Hamlet’s Starke Street sidewalk extension is almost complete. The sidewalk is being installed along the west side of Starke Street from Plymouth Street north to the gas station. Engineer Lee Nagai told the town council Wednesday that Covenant Concrete had just one more section of concrete to pour.
He said it’ll be a big improvement for residents’ safety. “There’s a lot of people who walk up and down that street,” Nagai said. “I was really surprised. If you’d have told me that beforehand, that there’s that many people up and down the street at nine, 10, 11 o’clock at night, I’d have said you’re full of beans. But there’s a lot of pedestrian traffic.”
Nagai added that the new sidewalk is handicap-accessible, “So I mean, in theory, if you had somebody who was handicapped, they could get from inside of town all the way out and to the convenience store.”
“Well, I don’t know if they can make it over the railroad tracks,” Council President Dave Kesvormas pointed out.
“Well okay, you’ve done what you can do; let me put it that way,” Nagai responded.
Council members also had some concerns with the way the sidewalk crosses the entrance to the trailer park. Rather than simply approaching the wide driveway from either end with a crosswalk on the existing pavement, Covenant Concrete actually poured a concrete sidewalk inside the driveway for its entire width. “My thinking of it is, okay, he’s going to lay probably 35 feet of sidewalk down, and we could probably very well have used that and be kind of justified in using that for light bases,” Kesvormas said. But it was pointed out that the trailer park entrance is technically a driveway, not a public street, and that was the same method used at all the other driveway crossings.
The new sidewalk is part of a larger rehabilitation of North Starke Street, done through the support of the state’s Community Crossings program. Nagai said there may still be some work to do, to refine the street’s drainage system. “If you guys remember, we had Walsh & Kelly bury a tile along the west side of the road,” Nagai told council members. “So what we may need to do is go back in and dig that up in a couple places and put a little yard drain there.”
He also said there may be an underground utility issue, but there may be some money left over from the paving portion of the project.
