Highway & Forestry Division

Highway Division

Mission Statement

The mission of the Highway Division is to maintain in safe and clean conditions the Town's streets, sidewalks, and stormwater management system, provide safe movement of vehicular traffic by performing construction repairs, snow, and ice removal, maintaining traffic control devices, signs, and markings, and supervising the work of contractual service providers.

Duties and Responsibilities

The Highway Division provides the safety and maintenance of all public streets and sidewalks. The Highway staff is responsible for the condition of 314 lane miles of road and associated street markings (including center and gutter lines, crosswalks, and stop bars), and several thousand traffic and street signs. Highway Division staff patch roads, install asphalt curbing, repair potholes, resurface, sweep, sand, and plow the streets, maintain approximately 20 miles of sidewalks, maintain and repair parking and traffic signs and posts, and oversee contracts for the painting of street lines and crosswalks. They are also responsible for cleaning and repairing the thousands of catch basins and manholes on Town roads and maintaining the drain system and associated brooks. Work by developers, contractors, and homeowners are inspected by the Highway Division to ensure proper construction between the public and private interface. Highway employees also provide support to the composting facility.

Forestry Division

Mission Statement

Through a proactive maintenance program, the Forestry Division maintains the Town's urban forest, preserving the green character designed to build community pride, while promoting public safety through the elimination of hazardous trees.

Duties and Responsibilities

The Forestry Division maintains and removes trees on Town property. The Forestry Division maintains an undetermined number of trees on Town streets, in parks, and on conservation lands, and numerous miles of roadside scrub / brush along with public ways. The objectives of the tree maintenance program are to identify and reduce hazardous conditions that threaten public and private property, resolve requests for service and emergencies in a timely fashion, and increase the health of the urban forest through planning and proper maintenance.