Road from nowhere? Stories differ on origins of Peoples Academy shortcut

During an initial public hearing for the proposed 2020-2030 town plan during the Nov. 15 selectboard meeting, Copley Avenue resident Kathy Chafee said she was surprised to read that a roughly 50-foot shortcut connecting her road to Upper Main Street was already included in the plan, and it was the first time she’d heard of the proposal.

It even has a proposed name: Alexander Street. The plan calls for both the town and school district to seek funding for its right-of-way acquisition and construction.

The street, if it were ever to be built, would encroach within 50 feet of her home, Chaffee said.

“I think when you do things like this in the village where the property is very small, you should at least include people, adjoining property owners,” Chaffee said. “I mean, this is a shock to me.”

Planning director and zoning administrator Todd Thomas, who has spent the past few years with the town planning council drafting the town plan, told Chaffee that the idea for the new road came from the school district — he said the school board and staff largely wrote the education chapter of the town plan — after being presented with multiple options on how to alleviate traffic.

“This is what the school board chose. No one in this room made this decision,” Thomas said to a packed hearing, near capacity in the town offices and with nearly another 40 tuning in remotely. “This is the school’s choice of where they wanted to come in. It makes the most economical sense. That’s why it’s in the plan.”

The day after the selectboard’s public hearing, Chaffee told Lamoille South school directors “it’s a bad option,” if it was the school district’s decision.

“It’s just taking their traffic problem and moving it 500 feet up,” she said.

Board chair David Bickford denied the school district had any involvement in the creation of Alexander Street or its inclusion in the town plan.

“As I understood it, the explanation was last night that somehow we had asked for it. We have never asked for it,” Bickford said.

Whose idea?

A public records request seeking information regarding a proposed Alexander Street was sent last Thursday to both Thomas and to school district officials, but no one was able to provide any information on the proposed street’s origins.

Thomas said the school district “largely wrote the education chapter” in the town plan, a statement corroborated by correspondence in late 2019 between town and school officials, also acquired in the public records request.

The town planning council did, between December 2019 and January 2020, discuss adding a few things to the education chapter, including the designation of PA as the high school for Lamoille South and designating Stowe High School as the merged district’s middle school.

“This was just as we were coming together as a unified district,” Bickford said last week.

That idea did not go over well with school officials, and town planners backed off their efforts to include such Morristown-first language in the plan.

A January 2020 letter to the school board from the planning council suggested having a meeting with school officials to settle on one of three different spots for an access road between Upper Main Street and Copley Avenue, one of which became Alexander Street.

The board rebuffed such an offer. Bickford wrote back to the planners saying the Lamoille South’s board was responsible for educational governance in Elmore, Stowe and Morristown, not just the latter.

School board member Dave McAllister, who sat on the Elmore-Morristown school board a couple of years prior to the district merging with Stowe, said last week that a subcommittee tasked in 2017 with looking at potential school improvements discussed a second access road off Upper Main Street, but it was further east, and would have cut directly to the high school campus.

Thomas said the town plan — which is still in the draft phase, and in between public hearings seeking community input — is only an aspirational document. He said in an email this week that the name Alexander has a nice tie-in to Copley Avenue, since that was Copley’s first name.

“Alexander Street does not exist yet,” Thomas said. “It is only an idea in the town plan.”

Planning council member Josh Goldstein said in an email Tuesday that he didn’t “think anyone was cut out of the loop as all of our meetings are posted and we feverishly welcome public comment.”

“I don’t think Todd, nor the school board, are being disingenuous in their comments,” Goldstein said. “We are dealing with human memories. I can attest the discussion happened a while ago, and I have no recollection how the idea was birthed.”