Ledyard — Ledyard Town Center Committee members Monday night essentially settled on a concept design for improvements to be funded with a $500,000 state grant.

After reviewing several options, they picked an approximately $426,000 plan that will add on-street parking, trees in front of Ledyard Center School and "period-style" lamps primarily to light new pedestrian walkways. It also will provide for a stone wall similar to what recently was built at the school's south end to "create that look throughout" the town center.

Committee members, however, did ask for two changes to the plan.

In one change, they opted not to rip up the existing sidewalk and build a new one closer to the parallel parking spots the plan will create. Although a new sidewalk would've allowed residents to step from their cars to the sidewalk without hitting a grass median first, it would've cost about $30,000.

Instead, they decided to should use the $30,000 to create bike lanes along the town center stretch, which sprawls approximately from the Ledyard Congregational Church to the Dime Bank.

Going forward, committee Chairman Jeffrey Beacham said, Kent and Frost Landscape Architecture — the firm out of Mystic that will receive more than $60,000 to take the project from kickoff through construction — will finalize the plan. The committee likely will send the plan on June 1 to the Planning and Zoning Commission.

After Planning and Zoning approval, Beacham said the bidding process could take about five weeks, pushing the selection of a contractor well into summer.

Still, Beacham and committee member and Councilman Kevin Dombrowksi said the committee is ahead of its 1960s and 1980s predecessors, which they said never managed to make the improvements.

"Everybody had the same idea, the same concepts," Dombrowski said, referring to past committees formed for the same purpose. "The difference is we actually moved forward and got funding."

Already, the Ledyard Town Center Committee successfully carried out a 2011 Small Town Economic Assistance Program grant — the same program responsible for the current $500,000 with which it's working — to create the stone wall at the school's south end.

At the moment, the committee's plans are affected by neither the new police facility project that's ongoing nor the upcoming demolition of the Ledyard Center School.

The police facility project, Beacham explained, already includes landscaping. He said the committee would consider changing its proposal, however, should bids for that project come in unexpectedly high, forcing the town to cut the landscaping from the final product.

Committee members Monday night also discussed possibilities for the green space that will be left once Ledyard Center School is demolished: athletic fields, stages, wraparound walkways. But, as committee and Board of Education member Stephanie Calhoun said, they merely were "brainstorming."

l.boyle@theday.com

Twitter: @LindsayABoyle