GUILFORD — Linda Hecker and the other members of the Conservation Commission are the most recent participants on a journey to correctly classify town roads. They recently reported progress to the Selectboard.
At the board's Jan. 12 meeting, Hecker told the board that she recently discovered an unsettling truth.
“Officially, [we don't live] on any road at all!” she said.
Hecker's address, which has been regarded as part of Packer Corners for as long as she has lived there, is technically part of an unlabeled class IV highway.
Until recently, town Selectboards were charged with identifying only major routes. After the passage of Act 178 in 2006, known as the “ancient roads act,” town government also assumed responsibility for identifying class IV highways and legal trails and adding them to the state's general highway maps.
This task matters. A road, highway, or legal trail receives different levels of financial assistance from the state and federal governments and requires different maintenance from the town. It also makes a difference for usage and land ownership.
Class IV highways receive a minimum level of maintenance from towns and are still considered roads. Legal trails are public throughways, and they might not permit the passage of vehicles.
Class IV highways and legal trails will now be added to the official state record, even though they receive no state aid.
The professional guidance of local Geographic Information System (GIS) expert Jeff Nugent, a senior planner with the Windham Regional Commission, has led to six potential changes to town roads, including resolving the Packer Corners discrepancy.
“What we have here is E[nhanced] 911 technology on an 18th-century road network,” Nugent explained this week.
Addresses as residents understand them do not necessarily correspond to legal public thruways, but rather to the designation allotted by emergency services, he said.
Nugent explained that if you are having a heart attack, you don't care if the ambulance drivers know that you live on a class IV or a class III highway, you just want emergency personnel to get there quickly.
E911 is responsible for most road names in rural Vermont. Previous maps represented these roads with numbers.
Still in Vermont
At the Selectboard meeting, participants joked when Hecker made her announcement.
“You're still in Vermont!” one told her.
“It's a good thing,” Hecker added. “I couldn't have taken another of those Packer Corners' winters!”
The Selectboard will soon submit the commission's findings to the Vermont Agency of Transportation.
Maps combining official VTrans records and E911 labeling can be found at windhamregional.org/gis.