FARMINGTON — The state expects to close Route 10 through Farmington completely for about two weeks next summer so crews can replace the culvert under Main Street near Tunxis Street. Main Street is Route 10. The window is July or early August, after school lets out.
That is the plan as the town understands it, and almost nothing about it is settled.
Public Works Director Russ Arnold told the Town Council on September 8 that the Department of Transportation "thinks they're going to be out there next summer," and that the town is "just waiting to get a final schedule." Asked whether the closure would apply to people on foot as well as cars, he would not promise anyone could get through.
"Pedestrians are going to be able to get by at some, for the most part, at this point. I can't guarantee that right now," Arnold said. "But we've got to wait and see. The plans aren't far enough along yet for details like that. So there may be a period where nobody can get by."
That matters more than it sounds. The Birch Hill Apartments sit on one side of Main Street and the Highland Park Market plaza sits on the other, and for some stretch of those two weeks, crossing between them may not be possible at all.
Nobody at the meeting asked where drivers should go instead, and the town manager's written report does not say. The state designs traffic control for its own projects, so a detour presumably exists on a plan somewhere. It has not been described publicly.
Sign up for the alert, because you are probably not on it
The town says it will put variable message boards at each end of Route 10 and send an Everbridge notification when the closure arrives.
Everbridge is the town's alert system, and by the town's own description its emergency database contains only traditional landlines. A mobile number, a text, an email address: none of those reach you unless you have logged in and added them yourself, through the town's Everbridge page. Anyone who has not is waiting on a landline they may no longer own.
The project also does not appear on Farmington's construction projects page, in progress or proposed, though that page carries two other state-run jobs.
Two weeks instead of eight months
The full closure is a choice. Keeping one lane open and flipping traffic while crews work would stretch the job to seven or eight months.
"For two weeks in the summer, I think we can deal with it instead of a seven or eight month long project," Arnold said.
The structure coming out is Bridge No. 02110, built in 1924. Connecticut has it on the transportation department's FY27 state bridge list at $3.6 million, of which $2.88 million is federal and $720,000 is the state's. The list carries no municipal share. The replacement is a box culvert roughly 60 to 70 feet long, and its width is what finally makes a sidewalk possible on the east side of Main Street, where the ground drops off and there has never been room for one.
And a sidewalk, for free
When the bridge is finished, the state will extend the Main Street sidewalk to the Birch Hill Apartments and paint a crosswalk to the market plaza. Farmington pays nothing. The work closes a gap the town left in about 2021, when it ran a sidewalk up the east side of Route 10 from Route 4 to Main Gate and stopped.
The catch is the one the Ad Hoc Sidewalk Committee spent the earlier half of that same meeting documenting. Four parcels held by two property owners abut the new stretch. Nobody will bill them for construction. From the day it opens, under the town ordinance, they are responsible for shoveling it within 24 hours of a storm, repairing it when it lifts, and answering for anyone who falls on it.
A free sidewalk is free to build. It is not free to own.
The dates
Route 10 is the state's right-of-way, and the state does not have to hold a hearing on any of this. The town asked for one anyway, because Chapter 169 of the town code requires it before the council can act on a Main Street sidewalk.
- October 13: Town Manager Kathleen Blonski asks the council to set the hearing.
- November 10: the hearing, if they set it. The Meadow Road hearing in April is what one looks like.
- Next summer: the closure.
Only the first of those is on a calendar. The second is what Blonski will ask for. The third belongs to the state, which has not committed to it. 🏛️
This coverage is supported by Farmington Storage, 155 Scott Swamp Road, the only storage facility in Connecticut with Museum air. A culvert built in 1924 comes out of Main Street next summer, which is a good run for anything left outdoors in Connecticut. Farmington Storage keeps things indoors, at a temperature and humidity somebody actually chose. 860.777.4001 📦
Jack Beckett has covered Farmington long enough to know that "we're just waiting to get a final schedule" is the most honest sentence anyone said at that meeting. He is on his third coffee and has read the state bridge list. ☕
The Farmington Mercury covers the town nobody else is covering: the two-week road closure that is not on any town web page yet, the culvert nobody has thought about since 1924, the public hearing nobody has to hold and the town asked for anyway. We publish slowly and without apology. Our motto is "Always last to breaking news" and we mean it, because by the time you read this somebody has checked the bridge number. Find us at farmingtonmercury.com and tell your neighbors. #WeAreFarmington 📰