character reporting on the corner of belmont street interpol road the shovels represent the groundbreaking ceremony that begins today the much anticipated road work all the way from  tell us how long this project is planning on taking i think their latest estimate is between eighteen and twenty two months and they're going to start at the wall fam line and go down to the cambridge line so we're going to see a lot of activity it'll all be in different stages of completion over time but by a around the year and a half we should be all done ok how do you expect the ascetics of the road to change oh it's going to be a tremendous improvement in the streets  and bikes but also for pedestrians and strollers i think it's going to be a very good improvement for business all the businesses on the corridor as well as the neighborhoods that abut the car so this project is going to save my work which allowed the application to be made into the projects selected so it's a collaborative between local funds but mostly coming from state funds thank you very much for i am here with glen killian cia director of community development as someone who commutes from boston about mine every day during the construction can i expect delays or can you tell us about the d tours that i may expect well the best way to answer that is to think about what  going on on the any given day that you're traveling in the corridor one of the things that we're lucky about here on trial of a belmont street is the roadway is wide and so in theory they'll be wrong to be able to manage traffic while they're still operations occur whether it's cur work sidewalk work so i think in general the expectation is that there would be very little road closure in there for detour and certainly when they do a paving you know you may find that you have to detour around a paving operation but i think the expectation in the hope is that because the roadway is so wide you'll be able to manage traffic flow by the operation and not impacted too greatly thank you and what about when they're doing the water main construction will that work that will be occurring as part of the road construction is actually storm drainage so there's a see significant amount of storm drainage that will be installed or are upgraded in the corridor once again i mean the hope is because the roadways wide enough that they'll be able to do some of these operations without impacting traffic you know is part of the requirement is the contract to meet with the local police departments they talk about traffic management certainly if there's an operation that's going to impact traffic flow they would schedule it off the peak hours so you may find an operation going on at eleven o'clock in the morning as opposed to eight o'clock in the morning they do their best to try to manage that life but you know it into a half miles of roadway it's inevitable that there will be some delays the challenge is to minimize that delays mr king thank you very much good afternoon everyone and welcome on this glorious day to the groundbreaking for this great contract the reconstruction of the pell road frank and thank you for being here frank i do support of this project your leadership in pushing this through has been invaluable as the there's been so many bumps in the road since it got to the legislative level and it's been great to have your support behind it but you know the story goes back so much further that the story goes back more than ten years probably to about two thousand when the board of selectmen the then board of selectmen commissioned a study to think about the economic development of this side of town and then out of that came the need to rebuild the road redesign the streetscape and make it something that knitted the communities together instead of dividing the communities as it does now and the then the traffic advisory committee got involved and started a process to gather input and i think it was really a model process because it could be a committee brought all the business owners with their parking concerns and the residents with their concerns about tree cover on the sides of sidewalks the availability of crosswalks everything was considered everything was discussed and the result was a project which proved the great work of our consulting engineers and they deserve to be carefully recognized the result was a project which w was subjectively rated rose to the top of a pool of one hundred sixty plus projects be considered by the metropolitan planning organization as potential projects to fund and therefore had to be funded and the town engineers work in this glen clancy from beginning to end you know steering that process with the traffic advisory committee with the consultants than ultimately take it up to the state it's just a huge huge contribution to this town so and they need all t partnering with watertown and addressing some of the issues that came up as we went through that process it's just been one of these things that brought people together step by step over a period of years and you know it's i am so thrilled to have a construction team on site today we look forward to working with you and supporting you with you as the as the process goes forward let me just take a moment to recognize a few speed people by name who are public officials here in support but i recognize angela friends of my colleague on the board for much of that period when we were working together on that tha realize how big a road is a road is just a huge thing there's so many different stakeholders involved in a row that you have to work with that's the bottom line though this is a huge collaboration of a lot of stakeholders and i'm just thrilled to be here today with you thank you all so much for coming and we look forward to working with  issue as this worked its way through the state we get e mails from will it say well this is where it's the at this is where it goes and frankly get to a point where some of the brownsburg are actually went door to door to get the signatures necessary from the residents there to move this thing forward so thank you so much will for your  thanks everybody it's a beautiful day and this is a tremendous day for belmont in watertown and really the whole region because transportation is the key to economic development it's a key to quality of life and so i want to thank everyone  who was involved getting a project like this done is an example of community cooperation and the sheer amount of work that goes into something like this it is truly amazing and to be here today for such an important event and going forward if there are any way i can help i'm going to be there to help as the project moves forward so thanks everyone for being here it's a wonderful day and next i'd like to introduce  a low everybody i want to also add my thanks to all the people of work so hard on this project for so long slow grounds for as everyone has noted really is spearheaded this from the start but there are so many other people both in belmont and watertown and then of course our colleagues at the state level at mascot who have ultimately been the ones to search take this from a technical point of view and work out the funding and bring it to this point where we're really about to about to see some dirt fly on behalf of the people in watertown i mean we certainly have been looking forward to this project for a long time it's going to have a very important beneficial effect for businesses up and down this corridor for i think all of the people who live in this area who had to deal with a difficult commute through this area for many years and there are a number of people in watertown that some of the counselors have been introduced but there are a number of people in our in our local government who have been deeply involved in all of the you know the detailed conversations that go into a project like this steve with the moon who's the head of our community development and planning office is here representing not just himself and our manager mike dress the law unfortunately can't be here but a whole host of people in our public works department other people in the planning department people in our traffic commission who are involved in this and this really is a great example of a regional effort of a collaboration of watertown and belmont have our rivalry and some areas we're looking forward to the thanksgiving day game this year of the watertown high school football team i want to mention is undefeated not that i want to put too much fear into the folks over there in belmont but so we have our rivalries it's a it's a it's a it's a healthy friendly rivalry but we are close neighbors and when it comes to a project like this  are ready in watertown to work close with our friends in belmont to come out with ultimately a project that's going to help everybody in both communities so thank you all for being here i think we got so many people here today if everyone will grab a shovel we ought to be able to get about half of this project done by jenner time so let's get to it thank you