WILLIAMSBURG — State officials are seeking a $30 million federal boost to help push a project for Route 9 reconstruction and construction of a shared-use path between Haydenville and Williamsburg closer to reality.

The Massachusetts Department of Transportation already has the work scheduled to begin on the $51.6 million project approximately five years from now, according to Carrie Lavallee, deputy administrator and chief engineer for MassDOT’s highway division. Federal highway money through the Rural Surface Transportation Grant program would move the process up a couple of years, she said.

“If we get the grant, the whole project’s financed,” Lavallee said. “It’s a very expensive process, but we think it’s worthwhile.”

The project is intended not only to modernize a stretch of the highway, but to resolve Mill River flooding and erosion of the roadway embankment, according to a Monday letter from MassDOT Secretary Gina Fiandaca to U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg. It will connect Haydenville and the center of Williamsburg with a brand new two-mile path for bicyclists and pedestrians between the highway and the river.

The lack of space for walking or cycling along that stretch of highway was identified as a problem in Williamsburg’s 2008 Open Space Plan, and was the impetus for the creation of the Mill River Greenway Committee over a dozen years ago, committee chair Gabriel Immerman said. The committee has been meeting monthly ever since to advance this project, convening public forums and advocating at the state level.

Building public support helped get the greenway plans incorporated into the scheduled rebuild of Route 9. On behalf of the committee, Immerman offered enthusiastic support for the grant application in a letter to Buttigieg last week, saying the project “will address a host of local challenges with one smart and elegant solution.”

The Northampton Bikeway at present ends just over the Williamsburg line. Along with other connecting projects in the planning stage, the Route 9 Mill River Greenway project will create a trail connection through to Williamsburg. The larger goal is to build a trail connection to Boston, 105 miles east, over the Mass Central Rail Trail, where 55 miles of trails have been constructed to date, according to MassDOT.

The Route 9 project is one of several bridge and highway projects pending in town over the next several years. Most immediately, MassDOT is moving ahead with plans to rebuild two bridges over the Mill River in Haydenville and reconstruct the road connection between them.

“It’s not an exaggeration to say there’s over $100 million worth of infrastructure in the pipeline for Williamsburg in the next five to seven years,” Immerman said.

The Healey administration is pursuing more than $2 billion in federal funding for four different projects under the FY 2023-24 Multimodal Project Discretionary Grant Opportunity, with the Williamsburg project the only one in the rural category. That grant “supports projects to improve and expand surface transportation in rural areas to increase connectivity, improve the safety and reliability of the movement of people and freight, and generate regional economic growth and improve quality of life,” according to the administration.

“From day one, we said our administration was going to compete for the unprecedented level of federal funding opportunities available to support infrastructure projects across our state that are crucial to our communities, economies, and environment. These ambitious applications represent an important step forward toward delivering on that promise,” Gov. Maura Healey said in a statement.

Also included in the administration’s grant application are the Cape Cod bridges, the Allston I-90 Multimodal project, and the North Station Renovation and Draw 1 Bridge Replacement project.

Lavallee said she expected the grant awards would be announced approximately a year from now.

James Pentland can be reached at jpentland@gazettenet.com]]>