MELROSE — Mayor Jen Grigoraitis submitted the following testimony last week to the Massachusetts Legislature’s Joint Committee on Transportation:
Thank you for the opportunity to submit testimony on behalf of the City of Melrose in support of H. 53, An Act financing long-term improvements to municipal roads and bridges.
Chapter 90 is an indispensable resource for cities and towns like Melrose. It’s not only used to build and repair city-owned roads and bridges, or just to fill potholes; but also, to procure, design and install traffic lights, street lighting, sidewalks, crosswalks, bicycle lanes and pedestrian accessibility improvements.
Every resident, local business, and visitor to our community benefits from these investments.
In recent years, Melrose has leveraged Chapter 90 funds beyond paving alone, to improve the functionality, curb appeal and safety of our neighborhoods.
As part of our Complete Streets efforts in the past decade, Melrose has installed 27 sets of Rectangular Rapid Flashing Beacons (RRFBs) with an investment of over $200,000. We have spent over $80,000 to deploy 20 solar speed feedback signs on the city’s busiest roadways to calm traffic and reduce inadvertent speeding by motorists. We have redesigned and rebuilt nine major intersections and added or rebuilt sidewalks on over 20 streets in order to adhere to traffic engineering and pedestrian safety best practices.
These kinds of improvements are often relatively inexpensive, but the capital funding available to municipalities like ours is dwarfed by the enormous number of eligible and worthy projects in our community. We rely heavily on state support to ensure our capacity to tackle these priorities.
Infrastructure projects and improvements mean a lot to our community and have made a measurable and marked impact for all users of our built infrastructure. But we have a long way to go, as evidenced by high school civics projects from Melrose Public Schools students and regular questions and hearings before our City Council and Traffic Commission about constituent priorities and needs.
We are grateful to the Healey-Driscoll Administration, the House of Representatives, and the Massachusetts Senate for delivering record levels of Chapter 90 funding last year. In fact, Melrose proudly hosted the signing ceremony for that legislation. We look forward to continued partnership and collaboration between City Hall and the State House for many years to come.
I respectfully urge the Committee to report favorably on the swift passage of H. 53, An Act financing long-term improvements to municipal roads and bridges.