Ashburnham may get dam engineering money

Ashburnham may get some help in the future from the state in engineering plans for repairing two of the three dams the state believes the town owns.

State Rep. Robert Rice (D-Gardner) and state Sen. Stephen Brewer(D-Barre) were able to get the House and Senate to pass the environmental bond bill that included $100,000 for engineering and repairs to municipally-owned dams in Ashburnham.

"Each of these projects has been determined by our local leaders to be critical to the local economy, delivery of public services, and historical and cultural preservation," Rice said. "I have addressed these critical projects with the Administration and I sincerely hope the Governor too will recognize their significance and approve them," Rice said.

Governor Deval Patrick still has to sign the bond bill.

The third high-hazard dam the state thinks the town owns is not located in Ashburnham but instead is located in Winchendon.

Paicos said he has tried to notify the state and the federal governments of this but that the paperwork continues to come to Ashburnham.

The bond bill process is separate from the annual budgets approved by the state government because projects are picked from the bond bills annualy by the governor for funding in a given year. A project must be part of the bond bill to be selected and bond bills are only created every few years.

"The $100,000 will probably be sufficient to do the engineering," Paicos said. The repairs will be in the hundreds of thousands or the millions.

"That will be a fight for another day," he said.

Last spring, Paicos appealed to the state Auditor's Office stating that requiring repairs and upgrades to the dams was an unfair and unfunded mandate, and asking the Auditor's Office to revise the mandate or tell the state it must pay.

No decision has been released from the Auditor's Office yet. "We can't bite off the burdens of dams," Paicos said.

There are a number of other dams in Ashburnham that are owned by private owners.

There are three categories of dams in Massachusetts — High Hazard Potential dams-if failure occurs- will likely cause loss of life or serious damage to homes, business facilities, public utilities or highways and railroads; Significant Hazard Potential dams-if failure occurs-may cause loss of life or damage; and Low Hazard Potential ones-if failure occurswill cause minimal property damage.

In the last six years, the state has rewritten the rules of dam owners two times and owners (including cities and towns) are required to hire a qualified engineer to inspect and report results every two years for High Hazard Potential dams, every five years for Significant Hazard Potential dams and every 10 years for Low Hazard Potential dams.