The full chronology is as follows:
6/2013 - Mill River Greenway Feasiblity Report
3/2015 - Fuss & O’Neill hired to design bicycle accommodations along South Main Street. They recommend creating a sidewalk on the west side of the street below Fort Hill Rd., and having bicycles ride on the street. Estimated price tag: $380,000, including $168,000 for a new pedestrian bridge crossing the Mill River at the rail trail dismount.
4/2016 - Mill River Greenway Community Forum. No record of the presentation, but lots of comments from attendees. Pages 4 & 5 of the comments pertain to South Main Street. Many people express a preference for running the sidewalk along the east (river) side of the street. No mention is made of bicycles riding on this sidewalk, but Greenway folks will later say that public input was for having the shared-use path run along the east side of the street.
4/2017 - Greenway update, Slide 48 shows “complete streets” for South Main: bicycles riding on the street.
12/2018 - Greenway update. “VHB is also helping [with] a study to qualify South Main Street for the MA DOT Complete Streets program, which funds improvements that benefit cars, bikes, and walkers as they traverse South Main Street between the Rail Trail and the Greenway (which will begin at the Library Bridge in Haydenville).”
4/2019 - Mill River Greenway Forum Presentation. Slide 32 lists plans for South Main Street: restore the sidewalk and paint "sharrows" (share-the-road arrows) on the roadway. No mention of a shared-use path; bikes will travel in the road with cars as recommended by Fuss & O’Neill. A report about the forum is on page 9 of the Spring/Summer 2019 Town Newsletter.
2019-2020 - Funding requests assembled for T-Bond bill. Senator Adam Hinds and Representative Natalie Blais are lobbied to include $2.393 million for Williamsburg projects: improvements to the Mill River Greenway and Mountain St.
2/2020 - MassDOT bridges presentation, including a 10-foot wide bike path replacing the sidewalk on South Main Street between the bridges. This is the first indication we’ve been able to find of a change in plans from “complete streets” to a shared-use path, but it’s not from the Greenway committee.
1/2021 - $16.5 billion 2020 T-Bond bill (House No. 5248) is signed by Governor Baker. An “emergency law, necessary for the immediate preservation of the public convenience,” it includes an item for Williamsburg that reads as follows: “provided further, that not less than $2,393,000 shall be provided to the town of Williamsburg for transportation improvement projects, including improvements to the Mill River greenway and Mountain street;”
2/2021 - Select Board minutes. “It was noted that Senator Hinds got funding in the most recent Transportation Bond for engineering the east portion of the South Main Street portion of the project.”
6/2021 - MassDOT Virtual Meeting on Mountain St. plans. Here, MassDOT publicly reveals its plans to reconstruct Mountain St. (a project, #607231, that had been in development since 2012). With DOT taking over Mountain St., T-Bond money is no longer needed to pay for work on three miles of Mountain St., and the Greenway project takes over the full $2.4 million amount for 1/3 of a mile along South Main Street.
9/2021 - Selectboard votes to sign contract with VHB for engineering design work on the South Main Street switchback and pedestrian bridge. Mill River Greenway will provide the $20,000 match. Motion was made and seconded (DB/WS) to authorize the chair to sign the contract with VHB, a Mass Trails funded project, in the amount of $80,000.
4/2022 - Greenway presentation. First Greenway mention of bike path for South Main, lost on the affected neighborhood as a result of no attempt being made to contact abutters. No attendee comments are available. The shared-use path appears in the slideshow from the meeting only as “design concept” lines sketched atop photographs in three of the 41 slides from the meeting.
8/2022 - Select Board votes to sign agreement with engineering firm VHB to pay $188,900 for engineering services and bid documents for the South Main St. connector, including the shared-use path replacing the sidewalk. Funding comes from a $194,500 Mass Trails Grant, applied for in May and awarded in July for design work on the switchback rail trail dismount, including a pedestrian bridge later dropped from plans.
9/2022 - Williamsburg submits $2.9 million Greenway plan to MassDOT
10/2022 - MassDOT approves $2.393 million funding for Greenway plan
4/2023 - Greenway presentation with South Main St. abutters finally in attendance (having been informed via flyers attached to telephone poles). Objections to the plan were raised, but comments from residents who live between the bridges were deflected as inapplicable to the meeting, due to this part of the project having been taken over by MassDOT as part of the bridges reconstruction project.
9/2023 - Petition from neighborhood objecting to Greenway plan and proposing that bicycles instead ride on street.