Infrastructure Upgrades – Gardner MA

The City of Gardner Massachusetts has accomplished successes in Infrastructure Upgrades, including, but not limited to:

Water

Sewer

Dam Repairs

Wastewater Treatment Upgrades

Street Paving

Internet Expansion

Sidewalks

Lighting

Playgrounds

Bicycle Lanes and Path

GardnerMagazine.com asked Gardner MA Michael Nicholson about infrastructure upgrades in Gardner. Here’s what he had to say:

Mayor Nicholson: Well, a lot of the stuff you don’t see is because its underground. If you look at the amount of water pipes and sewer pipes that we’ve replaced in the last year, or 2 years or 3 years in Gardner, some of those are put in when President Grant was president, after the Civil War. And the fact that we have something that old in the ground still feeding our population is not responsible in my mind. There are so many things that have been updated and new technologies and things like that, that how can you expect something that old to still function with modern day technology. And that’s why we had so many water main breaks for a little bit, is because the pipes just reached their old age. So by replacing all of those water pipes that were put in from 1866 to 1933, we made it so we now have greater water pressure in the city, were not losing as much water to leaks and cracks in the pipes. And its really made it so that were saving money in the long term. So now we don’t have to worry about as much on our water and sewer budgets. With that too, there’s the infrastructure that we’re working on to get fiber optic cable connecting all of our public buildings together. On each utility pole, there is a certain amount of space that is dedicated for municipal use. So one of the things that we’ve been doing is increasing the amount of fiber optic cable that we have that connects all of our city buildings. What that’s been able to do is save us about 50 thousand dollars a year in phone bills that we have because now we can connect through fiber optic cable between our buildings. Rather than having each building have its own phone contract with Verizon and Comcast. And it helps us on our Internet costs, it helps us on our phone costs. And really what it does is it keeps our fiduciary responsibility. So we don’t have to use our taxpayer dollars to pay those bills, as much as we can use them to reinvest back in the community and community projects