KENT, Conn.—In a hopeful sign of accord, the New Milford Town Council voted Monday night, June 23, to cooperate with the Kent Board of Selectmen to control commercial bus traffic on South Kent Road between Gaylordsville and Club Getaway.
The issue has been brewing for years with little relief for disgruntled residents of the rural residential neighborhood. So, the agreement between the towns to work “wholistically”—in the words of New Milford Mayor Peter Bass—toward a resolution to solve the problem is a welcome relief to homeowners.
“I have been getting so many congratulatory calls today,” said realtor Kristin Barese Tuesday, June 24. She explained that she had moved to Gaylordsville from Sherman five years ago, “on the very day the world shut down.”
Because of Covid, she did not realize until a year later that large commercial vehicles were using her narrow, twisty road as a shortcut to Club Getaway, a highly popular tourist destination.
“I have been trying for four years to get the road closed to commercial buses,” she said, “and other neighbors have been trying even longer. I started documenting [the traffic], and I found they were going to Club Getaway, so I reached out to David [Schreiber, co-owner of the resort], and I quickly learned he had been trying to get the companies to reroute their buses for a while. I was going to Mayor Pete Bass and the former Kent first selectman Jean Speck and they kind of pointed fingers at each other, saying it was New Milford’s problem, or it was Kent’s problem.”
Schreiber was “an absolute pleasure to work with,” she said, but his efforts to send buses along an alternate route had been ignored.
Part of the problem is that New Milford owns its portion of the road, while the state controls the Kent section, making it difficult to get it closed to through trucks.
Barese reports that two vehicles cannot pass each other when a bus is traveling the road. She dreads what could happen if a bus met an emergency vehicle such as an ambulance or fire truck. The road is also a registered bike path and she shutters to think of the potential for an accident.
“If I am walking my dog, I have to step into the edge of the woods as far as I can, she said. “I can literally drag my hand down the side of the bus as it passes.” Cars must pull on to lawns or into homeowners’ drives as a bus passes.
An alternate approach to the resort is available by going up Route 44 to the intersection of Route 341, both of which are larger state roads, but the drivers’ GPS signals send them along South Kent Road because it is purportedly four minutes faster.
GPS earlier proved to be a plague for Kent because it directed trucks that were too tall to pass over the covered span at Bulls Bridge, causing repeated damage to the historic structure before barriers were put in place.
Frustrated after trying to get a weight limit imposed on vehicles using the road or signage that would close it to large commercial vehicles, she tapered off her efforts, but then, about a month ago, she posted “a simple message” on Facebook asking if anyone else was bothered by the buses. “I got an overwhelming number of responses,” she said.
She renewed her efforts and got communication started between Bass, Kent First Selectman Marty Lindemayer and Schreiber. The latter two attended the New Milford Town Council meeting with her Monday, where she presented a petition with the names of 145 persons who object to the road’s use by buses. The New Milford leaders passed a motion to work with Kent to get the road posted.
“We will be in contact with the state and we are really going to pull for some kind of resolution,” Bass said.
He noted during the meeting that the road is only 15 to 16 feet wide in places.
“It’s a question of enforcement,” he said. “If we work together with Kent and our state legislative delegation to come up with a wholistic thing—weight limits or signage—and then let the bus companies know, we can have police patrols. First, we use the carrot of letting them know, and then the police department is the stick. Once they get some tickets, they will stop using the road.”
