HADLEY — Despite recent repairs on Moody Bridge Road, including installation of a new culvert pipe, members of the Select Board say they are not inclined to support a full, end-to-end, reopening of the street.

Closed to through traffic at the South Maple Street entrance since 2019, board members Wednesday advised interim Town Administrator Mike Mason and Department of Public Works Director Scott McCarthy against pursuing improvements that would allow vehicles to travel on Moody Bridge between South Maple and Bay Road.

“Other than serving as a cut-through for people who don’t even live in town, for the most part, it doesn’t make any sense to reopen the road,” board member David J. Fill II said.

The road was closed early in 2019 due to a culvert failure. While some living on the road asked that the road remain closed, others asked that it be reopened.

Fill said while there were concerns about police and fire response times because of the closure, there is no evidence public safety is being compromised. And since the closure, Moody Bridge has become one of the better walking nature trails, while farmers still have access to the nearby fields, he said.

Moody Bridge is also where the Fort River Birding and Nature National Recreation Trail is located, part of the Silvio O. Conte National Fish and Wildlife Refuge. That is accessible by vehicles from Bay Road, with some visitors also parking off South Maple where Moody Bridge is closed.

Board member Molly Keegan said many residents appreciate that the road is one way in and one way out by car and that the town’s limited resources should be spent on other roads.

“That would not remotely be a priority to me to put money into that when we’re looking at Rocky Hill and residential streets that are in disrepair,” Keegan said.

Mason said questions came up about reopening the road due to the recent repairs and there has been confusion about what is happening.

“We made the repairs because we had a crevice forming in the roadway, which is a liability to the town,” Mason said. He said the repairs were needed so that even those who walk along the road wouldn’t get injured.

During the work, McCarthy said he fielded multiple calls asking if the road was being reopened. “The repair was to alleviate a risk to the town. The road was in very bad shape there,” McCarthy said.

Mason said any idea of reopening would have significant rehabilitation costs.

The road is narrow and has a lot of brush and tree overgrowth where it was closed, as well as water “bleeding out” of the gravel,” McCarthy said.

“Personally, it may not be the best decision to reopen that,” McCarthy said.

McCarthy said his best guess is it would cost $30,000 or more to make the improvements, along with the culvert replacement. The town previously got a Federal Lands Accessibility Program grant to put a bridge in, but didn’t pursue that due to the in-kind costs. Such a bridge might run $1 million to $2 million, and conversations with federal officials indicated that no additional federal support would be coming, McCarthy said.

Select Board Chairman Randy Izer said he’s happy keeping the status quo. He noted that the repair was just to ensure pedestrians don’t fall into an adjacent brook, not for vehicular traffic “It’s going to cost a lot of money and we’ve got other, more important priorities,” Izer said.

The only member who brought forward support for reopening was Amy Parsons, who said many residents, farmers and non-farmers, have told her it should again become a full public way.

Parsons said she would like to see cost estimates for bringing it back to the condition it was in 20 years ago.

In addition, she asked if it should be reclassified in some way due to the closure at South Maple. But McCarthy said if the road were reclassified, it could cost the town some support from the state’s Chapter 90 road funding.

Scott Merzbach can be reached at smerzbach@gazettenet.com.