By Zack Anchors
Staff writer
    If all goes as planned, within a few years Scarborough’s Haigis Parkway will be a epicenter of the town’s growth, hosting not only a Cabela’s store, but also new office buildings, retail stores, a hotel and restaurants. But Scarborough’s Professional Gateway, as town officials have named the area, is designed to attract even more than the current development in the works. Ultimately, town leaders expect it will attract all sorts of “high-end” development, from biotech research and development facilities to a wide range of service sector businesses. The development of the Haigis Parkway, though, did not just spring up by itself. For years, the town has been taking steps to make the roadway appealing to developers. During the process, the town has taken some steps that have raised controversy among some of the people who will be most directly affected by what happens to the Haigis Parkway – the people who own the land alongside it.
    Linwood Higgins, who lays claim to three parcels on the parkway that amount to around 76 acres, is one such landowner.
    “One of the parcels has been in my family 50 years,” said Higgins, a real estate developer who served as Scarborough’s state representative from 1974 to 1990. “My dad bought it as a gravel pit. I bought another piece at auction in 1993, after they determined there was going to be a spur (from I-95 to Route One). The other piece I bought some time after that.”    
    Higgins thinks the town has been irresponsible in their handling of the Haigis Parkway and believes several town officials have been motivated by petty politics and personal grudges against him. He says the difficulties originated in 1996, when the Town Council changed the zoning of the Haigis Parkway.
    “They changed it from RF and/or B2 to HPZ, which was a completely new zone that was supposed to be upscale commercial office space,” said Higgins. “But without the sewer and the water you couldn’t build high end office space. So I’ve often said it was as close as taking someone’s property as possible.”
    Higgins said landowners on the Haigis Parkway were initially excited about the zoning change because they thought it would mean utilities were soon to come. But another ten years would go by before that actually happen.
    “It was politics...the makeup of the council changed and for whatever reason the majority of the council decided they didn’t want to help out landowners on the parkway,” he said. “There were lots and lots of rationalizations for it. The hardest thing for them to rationalize was when People’s Heritage Bank came knocking on the door and said, ‘If you bring the infrastructure in there, we’ll build a huge office complex.’ The council decided they would not do that and so (the bank) went to Falmouth.”
    Although he was frustrated it took the town so long to proceed with installing utilities for the parkway, once the project began Higgins found the way the town went about it equally frustrating. Higgins has just recently settled a lawsuit with the town of Scarborough over a recent revaluation of his property that relates to the utility project. Higgins and several other landowners, including Scarborough Downs, have accused the town of leaving them with a disproportionate amount of the costs of making the Haigis Parkway ready for development.
    “We all expected to pay something – to pay our fair share,” he said. “But we didn’t expect to have to pay more than our fair share and we never thought we would have to pay it up front.”
    The dispute centers around the town’s efforts to find a way to fund the recently completed utilities project. The town decided they would pay for the costly undertaking with funds harnessed by a new tax increment financing district (TIF) as well as with fees received from landowners. They decided to split it 50/50 ¬¬– the TIF takes care of half the costs and the landowners pay for the rest. How much each landowner would pay was based upon new assessments of their properties based on acreage and frontage. Higgins argued in his lawsuit that many other developments outside the Haigis Parkway would be benefiting from the new utilities but would not be sharing the costs. He also said 50 percent was an unfair amount for landowners to pay, especially since much of the land in the area is unusable land, due to the presence of wetlands.
    “My opinion is that they arbitrarily picked fifty percent,” said Higgins. “There wasn’t any rational reason whatsoever. I happened to think they picked the number based on what they needed to make principal and interest payments for the first four or five years. They figured they could get us to pay and it wouldn’t come out of the general fund.”
    Higgins also thought it was unfair and unprecedented that landowners were required to begin payments just after the project was finished, instead of when they sell their property to be developed.
    “They’re forcing everyone in the district now to put their property on the market and sell it to pay the assessment, because the clock is ticking and they want their money,” said Higgins. “A year from now we’re got to make out principal and interest payments.”
    Regardless of how they went about the assessments, Higgins believes the town should have taken an entirely different approach.
    “I was always of the opinion that it should be based upon usage,” Higgins said.
    By determining how many gallons of sewage a particular development would create, Higgins says the town could create a fair way to distribute the costs of the utilities.
    And underlying all of the technical matters was Higgins’ claim that some of the town’s decisions were guided by “prejudice and bias” against him.
    Ultimately, the outcome of the lawsuit’s settlement was to change the landowners’ share of the costs from fifty percent to forty percent. Higgins says he still thinks the arrangement is unfair, but that if the town had offered forty percent from the beginning the lawsuit would have been avoided.
    With utilities now installed and the Cabela’s development moving forward, property on Haigis Parkway has become very valuable real estate. But Higgins is worried that he will not be able find an interested buyer, especially now that there is already so much being built on the other end of the parkway.
    “The concern I have is that the focus is now going to be on them – there goes my demand,” he said. “Someone will say, I’d rather be in the office buildings down there rather than on Higgins’ land.”