Franklin scout creates butterfly garden for school
Franklin, MA
Providing accurate and timely information about what matters in Franklin, MA since 2007. * Working in collaboration with Franklin TV and Radio (wfpr.fm) since October 2019 *
Other streets expected to be improved this year include all or part of Mill Street, Anchorage Road, Summer Street, Partridge Street, Daniels Street, Dover Circle and Winterberry Drive.
Workers will narrow some roads, such as Sahlin Circle and Anchorage Road, by several feet to reduce the amount of surface impervious to water, helping keep pollutants out of surface water, Cantoreggi said.
Streets are selected based on the amount of traffic, safety considerations, drainage problems and the overall condition of the road and utilities that run underneath it, Cantoreggi said.
"I've gotten calls from every area of town, and we have limited funds," he said. "We try to spread out the work throughout town."
Franklin's nonprofit idea is not new. The first nonprofit access stations were formed in the early 1970s as cable television grew in popularity and regulations required cable companies to fund local programming. Other stations were run by the towns themselves or by the cable companies.
In the past 10 years, Comcast has stopped running many cable access stations it inherited when it purchased AT&T Broadband, leaving towns to figure out how to keep providing those services, said Amy Palmerino, vice chairman of the Board of Directors of MassAccess, a statewide organization that advocates for public access television.
Many communities, including Milford and Hopkinton, created nonprofit stations when a cable company stopped running their studios, a move Palmerino said increases community participation and creates separation between the town and one of its primary media outlets.