9. Chair’s report on site-visit by staff from Dry Stone Conservancy: Jane Wooley the project manager and Neil Rippingdale, a master dry-stone mason from Scotland, came on June 1st. They, I, and city staff met for about an hour to discuss the situation, agreed that the desired course of action was not necessarily to restore the walls to “original” condition, if that involved mortaring the re-built walls. Dry stone is much more durable. We discussed ways to initiate the project, including a possible workshop or series of workshops, the first one in October, to train some current city staff and possible other apprentices in dry-stone masonry. Ray Anderson and I went with the DSC people to look at 3 local quarries for possible sources of stone. Footville’s quarry has the best quality stone for the walls, and it’s close by, thus minimizing cartage. After lunch, JW and NR made detailed measurements and took pictures of the entire course of Allen Creek from the dam to the bridge at Madison St. There are about 3000 linear feet of wall, including that “chicken-wire” wall just downstream of the dam, and the wall averages about 4 feet in height. Mayor Decker pointed out that JW and NR would “triage” the walls – what needs immediate attention because of safety issues, what should be done next, and what sections are in decent shape for the foreseeable future. DSC expects to send a detailed report before our July Meeting. As a very general “guesstimate”, the high end cost for having the walls rebuilt by a paid crew of six competent masons would be $400K, and would take about 12 weeks. This is about $100K less than the 5-year plan’s estimate. Labor is the majority of the cost; stone purchases would be a small proportion of the cost. Training local people to do much of the work under competent supervision (both paid) would reduce the cost, as we wouldn’t have to pay for importing workers, housing and feeding them. We could also do the work over several years.
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