By Zack Anchors
Staff writer
     During the nine years that Michael Wood served on the Scarborough Planning Board, the town of Scarborough was one of the fasting growing municipalities in the state. New housing developments were popping up throughout town, multi-million dollar commercial projects like Scarborough Gallery and the Cabela's development moved forward, the Maine Medical Center campus was built and the town began searching for new ways to manage all the growth so it would not degrade the town's quality of life and character. At the center of it all, the Planning Board was the gateway through which all this rapid change in Scarborough passed.
As Wood explained in an interview at his home last week, on the Planning Board it all comes back to the ordinance. The board's main purpose, he said, is to make sure that every aspect of a potential development is in alignment with Scarborough's code of ordinance. If it's not, then it's back to the drawing board.  
"The Planning Board is a quasi-judicial group," said Wood. "It wields a lot of power in some ways. But in other ways it doesn't. You're limited by what the ordinance says...you might have a personal opinion or an emotional opinion, but you have to make sure that doesn't make it into the discussion. You have to focus on the ordinance."  
When a developer presents their plans for a new project to the board, its members are supposed to be frank. If the stormwater management plan is inadequate or a traffic impact study is incomplete, the board tell them clearly what they need to work on.  
    But even when what the ordinance says is clear, sometimes interpreting it and applying it to actual development plans can be difficult. Just like judges, Wood said, Planning Board members have to make sure they are using the law the way it is intended to be interpreted and not straying beyond that.  
"It's not all black and white," he said. "There are gray areas...you've got to be sure that you're not looking at an applicant and creating new ordinance. You've got to work within these restrictions."  
Wood, who served as chair of the board for four years, reached the position's term limit this year. For the last year, Wood has served as vice-chair with Susan Auglis as chair. Next week will be his last meeting.   
Wood entered onto the Planning Board with very little experience in planning and development issues or in municipal government. He moved to Scarborough in 1983 to take a job as an air traffic controller at the Portland Jetport. A co-worker – current Town Councilor Jeff Messer – encouraged him to become involved in town government and eventually Wood joined Scarborough's open space committee. Not long after, a seat opened on the Planning Board and Wood was asked to fill it.  
"I thought, 'that seems like a lot of work, a lot to do,'" he said. "But if you just put your foot forward, it can be done. It's just ordinary people like me on the board." 
Wood says he spent a few months on the board mostly just listening and absorbing all the knowledge, but he had to learn fairly fast. After about a year, three other members left the board and Wood became vice-chair with attorney Rick Shinay as chair. 
"Rick's knowledge was limitless," said Wood. "I really liked the way he ran the meetings. But because he was a local lawyer he would sometimes have a conflict of interest and have to recuse himself, then I would have to chair." 
    During his nine years on the board, Wood noticed an evolution both in the makeup of the board and in the types of projects that filled the meeting’s agendas.
    “When I got on the board there were incredibly intelligent people on the board, but my sense was that they took more of an analytical approach,” said Wood. “Over time, you had a different makeup and you had people thinking of things more creatively.”
    Earlier in his time on the board, Wood said, many members had strong backgrounds in planning or municipal government and took a more “black and white” approach. Now, he said, there is more diversity among the members and an emphasis on looking at things from different perspectives. Also contributing to that new approach is the town’s recent establishment of design guidelines, which provide parameters for developments that go beyond the traditional zoning ordinance. The design guidelines provide restrictions on the types and appearances of buildings that can be built in particular areas ¬ for example, on the size of signs or the materials used in buildings.
    “Seven years ago, if people thought a building looked really stark or even ugly, they would talk about it, but there was no ordinance to address that,” Wood said. “Now there are design guidelines…if you didn’t have that effort we’d end up with a strip of highway that could be anywhere.”
    Wood said a major priority of the Planning Board now is preserving the unique character of Scarborough, a goal that is affirmed in the town’s comprehensive plan.
    “What we want is a sense of place,” said Wood.
    As an example, Wood described the process of approving Sullivan Tire’s warehouse on Route One. When the design of the 300-foot-long building first came to the board, said Wood, it looked like any warehouse you would find in an industrial area of any town. After several meetings in which the board expressed their dislike of the plan and offered suggestions, the developer brought forward a design with a façade that the board felt was more appropriate for the town’s vision of Route One.
    “The façade that is there today is a direct result of the applicant working with the board to make something that would work for everyone,” said Wood.
     Besides the shift to a more creative approach, Wood has also noticed a transition from intense residential development to more of a focus on the board on commercial development. He thinks that is due, in part, to a growth cap the council put in place that limits new residential development and the decreasing availability of land for development. Wood said that several years ago, when large subdivisions like the Thurston Woods development of Winwood Heights came to the board, they would often stir controversy. People who had lived in the same street for years had a hard time accepting that new developments would be doubling or tripling the size of their neighborhood, Wood said. 
    “In the last four or five years, there’s been a lot of big commercial development,” said Wood. “And I mean really big commercial development – multimillion dollar developments…in some ways, commercial development is easier. There are all these people working behind the scenes ¬– engineers, architects, landscapers…”
    Wood said he is always amazed by how much time and money developers are required to invest in the planning process. After adding up the cost of all the studies and documents developers have to provide the board the tally is often in the thousands of dollars, he said. That is why he always makes sure the last thing he does before a developer finishes with the board is to thank them for their efforts.
    Wood said he would like to continue serving the town in some form, maybe on the Zoning Board of Appeals or down the road in an elected office. He has been asked to run for council, but does not think he is quite ready.
    Wood encouraged others in the community to volunteer for the town’s boards and committees too. He says that even people who do not have experience in planning might fit well on the Planning Board.
    “I think it’s important to have a mix – real estate, law, planning and other folks who just have interest in how the town should grow,” he said.