Canaan/Falls Village Board of Selectmen
5/11/26 6:00 PM
Present: First Selectman David Barger, Selectmen Christopher Kinsella. Absent: Selectman Judy Jacobs.
The Town of Canaan/Falls Village closed down the Cobble Road bridge that stands over the Hollenbeck River back in March at the direction of the State of Connecticut’s Department of Transportation (CTDOT) due to its structural condition. Now, the Board of Selectmen is looking for funding to replace the bridge.
First Selectman David Barger and Selectman Christopher Kinsella spoke about the conditions of the bridge. “This is quite expensive, but what it came down to is the bridge is buckling,” Barger said. “It is beyond any structural damage. We got to the point where it was starting to buckle. Any of you paying attention as you drive by, you’ll see crews out there doing the design work. We are getting there.”
The village closed the bridge down after CTDOT officials evaluated the condition of the bridge in March, Kinsella said at a Board of Selectmen meeting in April.
Since then, the town has been working to find funding for the reconstruction of the bridge. The town will also have to replace the culvert on Cobble Road so that crews can transport equipment to the bridge area for reconstruction. Kinsella said the town has already appropriated $2,000 to pay Cardinal Engineering, a firm with offices in Litchfield and Meriden, to search for state funding that would repair the culvert.
Cardinal, Kinsella said, landed on applying for funding through CTDOT’s Transportation Rural Improvement Program (TRIP). If the town can secure the TRIP funding, the state could end up covering 80% of the culvert’s replacement costs, he added.
“The current grant we have approved for that is a 50/50 split,” Kinsella said. “That has escalated the cost of replacing the bridge and the culvert to around $1 million or more than that.” The town, however, may have an edge on potentially receiving the state funds.
“It is a shovel ready project, which is huge in determining who would be successful in getting that grant,” Kinsella noted. “When Cardinal eventually replaces that big bridge in three years, their assessment is that, due to construction activity, they would be reluctant to use that culvert because of the condition it is in.”
At the meeting, Barger also read out the findings of a report drafted by Eversource regarding the electric utility’s services in Canaan/Falls Village. The report is the 2025 Connecticut Reliability Scorecard.
“Everyone is concerned about their electric bills,” Barger said. “I don’t know If this makes you feel any better about how much you are paying.
Eversource has 1,353 customers in the town. The average customer in Canaan/Falls Village experiences an outage every seven months, Barger read from the report. An average outage in the town typically lasts around 280 minutes, he added.
“Outages in your community were more frequent than the state average of one every 20 months,” Barger said, reading from the report. “Your community’s outages were longer than the state average of 81 minutes. When an outage occurred, it took Eversource 165 minutes to restore power.”
In Canaan/Falls Village, 449 customers experienced three or more outages in 2025. Lastly, 202 customers experienced an outage lasting more than seven hours.
“Nowhere to move but up,” Kinsella said.
At the meeting, Barger also announced the retirement of the town’s longtime building inspector Jim Clarke. Barger noted that the town will start looking for a replacement this month,
“In the meantime we have struck an agreement with the Sharon building inspector Stanley MacMillan, who also does our fire marshall’s job to take a look at things as they come in,” Barger added.
