BY ANN GENADER
WEST MILFORD — The Township of West Milford Council Wednesday night accepted four Oak Ridge streets to be upgraded and taken over by the township as public roads. Presently they are dirt/gravel roadways.
The roads being taken over in entirety are Paul Street and Walnut Street. Portions of Jefferson and Harrison Streets are also being taken over as a result of the council vote.
The action involves requiring 50 foot wide right-of-ways for all four roads. Distances involved are Paul Street, lying east and intersecting Harrison Street 490 feet; Walnut Street, lying between Paradise Road and Jefferson Street, 580 feet; Jefferson Street, between Grove Street and New Jersey State Highway Route 23 - 520 feet and Harrison Street, between Grove and Paul Street, 260 feet.
There are a total of 20 properties on the four roads. When a vote was taken by the township to determine if residents wanted a road assessment program to proceed there were seven who voted in favor of it, five who opposed it and eight who did not respond to the postcard ballot sent to them by the township.
It is expected that the township will take bids for the work in the spring or the early summer.
Preliminary estimated cost for paving, drainage and curbing was said to be about $344,000. The cost will be divided among property owners based on the amount of property they have fronting on the road. They will each have a plan with a 10-year payment plan.
The township administration announced last month that the municipality will no longer plow or maintain roads that continue to be privately owned.
The council, in 2014, brought back the road assessment program that was used in the 1980s. It had been dormant for some time. Goldfinch Lane at Lake Lookover, the first project proposed in 2016, was turned down by a majority of the residents, as did the majority of people in the Echo Lake area where the upgrades were proposed for Fieldstone, Fountain, Inwood, Martha and Wood Streets, off Germantown Road.