By: David Deschesne

Fort Fairfield Journal, February 8, 2012

PERHAM, Maine— At their March 2011 town meeting, the inhabitants in Perham voted to spend $15,000 to chip-seal up to sixteen 100 foot sections of Tangle Ridge Road by the driveways of homeowners on that road for the purposes of keeping the dust down.

Tangle Ridge Road is a secondary road which has some pavement on one section of it. The areas to be chip-sealed are on a section of Tangle Ridge that is essentially a deteriorated field road that has never had paving or any kind of surface on it whatsoever. On dry days in the summer, the dirt road portion of Tangle Ridge is very dusty when vehicles travel on it at any speed, thus prompting Mark Malnichuck - a homeowner on Tangle Ridge Road - to take the initiative to write an article for the taxpayers to vote on in hopes of alleviating the dust problem.

Perham operates under a town meeting form of government, rather than town council. What that means is the voters in town decide what money gets spent on and how much. Selectmen are then elected to carry out what the voters decide. Each line item of their budget is an “article” that gets voted on at their annual town meeting. In March, 2011, Malnichuck had submitted an article to allot $15,000 of taxpayer money to chip-seal 100 foot sections of Tangle Ridge by the driveways of sixteen houses on that road. The townspeople subsequently voted to approve that expenditure for that purpose only to have the Perham selectmen do something completely different.

Rather than chip seal, which is relatively expensive and not appropriate for laying down directly on dirt, the selectmen briefly looked into a calcium-chloride process that would pack the road hard when applied properly. They ultimately settled on using reclaimed asphalt - asphalt that has been ground up from resurfacing projects elsewhere and recycled, known as “reclaim.” However, instead of placing the reclaim in front of the sixteen driveways as expected, the selectmen opted to do one long 1,600 foot stretch, one inch thick without rolling or packing.

“I originally submitted a plan to chip seal and the group consensus was it's not going to work. We tried the reclaim which kind of made sense,” said Malnichuck, who contacted a local paving contractor for advice on this project. “He came out with our highway guy and we chatted about it. At the time, he felt that the only way it was really going to work was a double layer and the double layer had to be put down in ideal conditions - like hot weather and no rain. The other thing he said was it had to be rolled really well.”

What ultimately happened was a one inch thick layer of reclaim that was thrown down loosely and not rolled. According to Perham head selectman, Jerry Dow, that is all that is going to be done at this point.

After all the work to craft an article that would pass muster with the selectmen, Malnichuck was taken aback when he found out they performed the road project drastically different than it was voted on. “Nobody ever came back to me on it. I jumped through hoops to come up with a plan, but nobody consulted with me on that research.”

Malnichuck admits the 1,600 foot section does help with dust control, but does not have the effect he intended. “I appreciate - as do the other residents - how well it works for the dust control. What was done was not what I intended to do; for example, the stretch between Ray (Wood's) house and mine used up a lot of reclaim and that could have been, I believe, better distributed.”

After having done all the work and research on the best way to handle the dust problem, then having it voted on by the voters in Perham, Malnichuck found that the Perham selectmen went and did what they wanted in the first place. “You guys [the selectmen] took the ball from me and went and did what you wanted to do which was not what I had intended to do in the article, because I wrote it so short and left the rest of it up to communication between me and the selectmen,” Malnichuck told the selectmen at their December 28, 2011 meeting. “It seemed like a lot of stuff got lost in the translation.”

“I talked to some of my neighbors and one of them had said that the guys putting down the single layer of reclaim thought it was kind of a joke doing one layer, that it wasn't going to last,” Malnichuck told the selectmen. “Another neighbor was basically told the same thing. I don't like seeing the town throwing money away.”

Malnichuck has crafted another article for this year's Perham town meeting to rectify the selectmen's error. “If indeed this article does go through, perhaps we could get the research I did.

The 1,600 foot section of Tangle Ridge that received the loosely applied reclaimed asphalt did not address dust concerns in front of the sixteen houses Malnichuck was trying to alleviate. That unpacked reclaim will be thawing out this Spring and is expected to quickly revert back to the dust and dirt mess it formerly was. Last Fall, the Maine Department of Transportation drove heavy equipment on that improperly applied reclaim section of Tangle Ridge, to construct a parking lot for a hiking/ATV trail, and destroyed most of the work that had been done there.

With this year's upcoming Town Meeting, Malnichuck hopes to salvage the improperly applied reclaim by rolling and adding a second layer before it completely deteriorates. “If we do go forward with the second layer that we try to expedite the second layer in front of the houses where it might last longer than in stretches of nothing.”