Irish Hill pedestrian bridge makes headway

The 100-foot cyclist bridge project over the LaPlatte River at the intersection of Falls and Irish Hill roads is finally making headway in Shelburne.

The project officially went out to bid last week — a final step for a project that has been nearly four years in the making.

Construction is anticipated to begin next summer.

Ideas for the bridge are blueprinted in the town’s 2019 town plan, which places a high priority on making Shelburne a safer and more attractive place for bicyclists and pedestrians and highlights the need for the bicycle-pedestrian bridge as one necessary component to make that happen.

“This facility will make it easier to cross the river safely,” town manager Matt Lawless said, noting that it directly connects neighborhoods to the town’s village center.

Rising costs, supply chain shortages and rejected grant proposals held up the project much longer than originally anticipated since 2019. Although the town was awarded a grant under the Transportation Alternatives Program in April, going out to bid last summer was an impossible move.

“We haven’t yet been able to put it out to bid because these kinds of grant programs are very complicated in all the steps that are needed,” former town manager Lee Krohn said in April. “Of course, with materials costs have escalated dramatically in the last year and a half. We’re hopeful that we may have close to enough money to actually get this done.”

But since that time, Lawless said that the construction market has settled, funding sources have solidified and the project has satisfied the federal standards associated with grant money.

“This project is 80 percent federally funded, which helps the town finances in a big way, but does slow down the construction project with those regulations,” he said, adding that he’s hopeful there will be a strong interest from bidders but noting it can be difficult to find builders for projects of this scale.

Voters at Town Meeting Day 2022 approved allocating $168,000 in local funding to build the pedestrian bridge, and in 2019 the town received a state grant for more than $100,000 for engineering, municipal project management and other work.

Lawless said this project was one of the major capital improvement plans on the priority list when he officially got to town in June.

“It was in a good point of readiness. The design work was well underway,” he said. “I wanted to make sure that we kept up that good progress and didn’t delay anything further. Work like this is hard to do in the winter, so this really is the right time to have the bid documents live. If we had delayed even a couple of months, it would have really set the project back.”