Warren shuts down north end work for the season

Warren residents got an early Christmas present Friday, when Warren agreed with contractors to pull the plug on paving along north Main Street until the Spring.

For more than a week, contractors and subcontractors for the Bristol County Water Authority had been laying an intermediate layer of asphalt atop trenches cut into the road this past Spring, when the authority started its $2 million water line replacement program.

The recent work has brought traffic to a crawl in north Warren, and with estimates that it could take another week or more to finish the job, Warren Town Manager Jan Reitsma, other town officials and contractors met Friday to talk about the pace of the repaving and whether it could be sped up. It was town officials’ hope to have the paving done by the holiday season, but estimates from contractors, who said paving could take another week or more, were “untenable,” he said. Mr. Reitsma said that instead of continuing further into the holiday season, the parties agreed Friday to stop the work now and resume in the Spring.

“We had tried all along this year to not have this disruption during the holiday season,” Mr. Reitsma said. “They got a fair amount done, but it was a judgement call. We would rather have this done now (but) they agreed to pull back and come back.”

Apart from the BCWA paving, work along Water Street is all but finished for the season. Apart from a drainage issue at Water and Church and some work that needs to be done on lateral sewer lines, workers have wrapped up.

Work, to complete infrastructure improvements and begin laying new road and sidewalk surfaces, will resume in the Spring.