The town of Peterborough closed the section of sidewalk outside of All Saints’ Church on Concord Street/Route 202 “for the foreseeable future” on Monday.
“With the snowfall and rain over the past two months, a considerable amount of water is overflowing on the sidewalk, making it impossible for us to maintain the sidewalk in the area,” Town Administrator Rodney Bartlett said.
The sidewalk is the town’s responsibility, but Route 202 is maintained by the New Hampshire Department of Transportation, and the Attorney General’s office determined that the drainage system was the responsibility of All Saints’ Church in November 2018, he said. “We have everybody involved.”
Jack Calhoun, the senior warden of the vestry at All Saints’, said the church plans to meet with the DOT in January to discuss potential solutions.
Calhoun said that water flow from the hillside has created a longstanding problem on Concord Street. The problem, he said, is that the six-inch culvert that crosses under Route 202 is overwhelmed by the amount of water that flows into it, leading to backups.
“You can’t put twenty pounds of potato in a five pound bag,” he said.
The church attempted to find a solution before and during the road’s repaving in the fall of 2018, Calhoun said.
“We made every effort to cooperate,” he said, but ultimately the specifications and timeline requested by the state made a solution impossible at the time.
He said that at the time, the church’s attorney disagreed with the determination of the Attorney General’s office, and that any solution that involved digging up a state road would necessarily need to involve the state.
“We are appreciative of the fact the state has reached out to talk to us,” he said.
In the past couple of days, Calhoun said All Saints’ has been looking into how to ensure churchgoers can safely cross from the parking lot across the street to the church during holiday services. He personally spent three hours chipping ice with a pickaxe, he said, a task he said was not in his typical job description.
“It’s really about the safety of people, not about whose problem it is,” he said.