LEVERETT — Leverett voters are being asked to accept a series of road layouts and pursue permanent easements to accommodate a $2.71 million state project to rebuild a bridge over the Roaring Brook at a special Town Meeting on Tuesday.

The session, taking up a 17-article warrant that also includes requested spending from the Community Preservation Act account, begins at 7 p.m. at the elementary school auditorium.

Most of the Town Meeting articles relate to the bridge replacement project on Millers Road, a dead-end road off Shutesbury Road, with voters to consider accepting layouts on that road and Bradway Road. Those decisions would allow the Select Board to record those actions with the Franklin County Registry of Deeds.

According to the plans, the existing steel-and-wood bridge over Roaring Brook, which serves two properties, will be replaced with a steel-and-concrete bridge. Before the current bridge is demolished, the state will also construct a temporary gravel driveway of several hundred feet connecting those homes to January Road, another dead-end street in the opposite direction from the brook.

Several of the articles, with work done by Chappell Engineering Associates, LLC, of Marlborough, require the purchase, gift, eminent domain, or otherwise, acquiring a temporary easement, to accommodate “the Millers Road over Roaring Brook bridge reconstruction.”

One of these, for instance, would acquire 3,771 square feet of land on Millers Road “for the purpose of crane swing radius, bridge reconstruction, grading, loam and seed, tree removal, and erosion control.” Others would acquire land “for the purpose of bridge wingwall reconstruction,” “for the purpose of a temporary road detour during construction for public to pass and repass, grading, loam and seed, and erosion control” and “for the purpose of guardrail removal and installation, loam and seed, and erosion control.”

CPA requests

The Community Preservation Act articles include authorizing the Select Board to appropriate and transfer $81,000 to permanently conserve 91 acres between Depot and Long Hill roads. A conservation restriction on the land will be held by the town’s Conservation Commission.

The land preservation project, initiated by Kestrel Land Trust and to be known as the Heronemus Forest Conservation Project, was approved by voters at annual Town Meeting last spring.

Another $8,000 from the CPA fund will go to the Leverett Historical Society to pay half the costs of a systems replacement plan for the Moore’s Corner Schoolhouse and Museum.

The final article is to allow for existing wooden posts and a wooden bench installed in memory of a late Leverett Elementary School student to be replaced with permanent stone posts and a stone bench on the back woods edge of the green space between the school and the Leverett Library. Such a project has to be done in compliance with the May 2021 annual Town Meeting article that mandates the field between the two buildings remain largely open.

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