Staff Writer 

 Last week a nine-member member committee consisting of representatives from the Scarborough Pine Point Association, the Beach Walk subdivision, the Sand Dollar and Lighthouse motels and Scarborough town officials delivered their final report regarding future improvements for Pine Point Road between Grand Avenue and King Street to the town council. 

As reported by the Leader in June, only one section of Pine Point Road was originally supposed to be repaved.

“We shot ourselves in the foot when we started talking about possibly adding sidewalks and narrowing the street. Once we started asking questions, we found it was not possible to come to a quick resolution. It just didn’t happen, so a nine-member committee should take a look at it,” former Town Manager Ron Owens said shortly before the committee was formed.

The 2008 committee was the second council-appointed group to review the Pine Point area in three years; in 2005 a similar group was formed in reaction to a proposal from Lighthouse Motel owners Peter and Nick Truman to convert the existing building to condominium space. According to a June 2, 2008 letter from the Pine Point Residents Group to former councilor Jeff Messer, the committee met under the leadership of former Town Manager Ron Owens for eight months but was ultimately disbanded when the Trumans scrapped plans for the condos in 2006.

This time, the town hired Dana Morris-Jones – a Scarborough resident and The Delphi Group, Inc. employee – to facilitate the committee’s discussions.

“The group made a lot more progress than it would have without a facilitator. Some of these [disagreements] have been going on for 20 years,” Jones said. “You have representatives from the town looking out for the whole, whereas everyone else has their own objectives.”

During the course of 10 meetings from September to December 2008, the group considered new travel lane and shoulder widths, the installation of new sidewalks and parking locations. 

“Right now [Pine Point Road] is host to a lot of bad infrastructure,” Town Engineer and committee member Jim Wendell said. “It’s wide open, there’s no pedestrian protection, draining control is poor and the slope isn’t viable.”

According to the 2008 report, Pine Point Road drainage infrastructure should be redesigned and extended, any curbing installed should be done with poured concrete and a .08-acre town-owned parcel abutting the Beach Walk subdivision should be “cleaned up” and kept open for future options. 

“Many committee members expressed support for the concept of using the [town-owned] parcel for a ‘beauty spot’ which would be identified as town property and allow public access to it. However, [Beach Walk Association representative John Wiggin] was opposed to it,” the report read.

The committee did not discuss the location of road signs since it was “not specifically part of the committee’s mandate,” and suggested the Comprehensive Planning Committee “or some other appropriate body” consider additional sidewalks to the Clambake restaurant and the epansion of a drop-off area for beachgoers on King Street.

Although the report also indicated the committee reviewed a final design, drafted by Wendell, “that creates a ‘more fully defined and operational intersection’” at Pine Point and King Street, exactly what the new intersection will look like remains a mystery to both members of the committee and concerned citizen groups.

“We never ended up with a final detail plan, it was really just a lot of pieces. Anything we have now is piecemeal. The sidewalks are in the wrong place, the travel lane is different and the elevations are off,” Wendell said. “For me, it was much ado about nothing.”

Despite Wendell’s opinion that any existing design plans could be misleading compared to the desires of the committee, Jones said one of his sketches was presented to the town council. 

“It’s preliminary in that it doesn’t have all the details laid out, but it was fairly detailed,” she said. “Did everybody say it’s perfect? No they didn’t, but there was a final drawing we considered. It’s really a lot of engineering things, most of that isn’t of interest to most people.”

Jones said the design presented to the council did include a proposal for the intersection between Pine Point and King Street, an area the Pine Point Residents Association – a self-described “informal group of citizens” – has been concerned with since the development of a town-installed directional island. According to a recent email to the Leader, the lack of a definitive visual aid has kept members of the Pine Point Residents Association from weighing in on the committee’s recommendations.

“We have not seen this new design and it was not broadcast on the local access channel,” the Pine Point Residents Association wrote. “We are concerned that this work was not presented to, nor endorsed, by the committee.”

Jones said she did not know why the design hadn’t been provided to the Pine Point Residents Association, but was confident they could gain a sense of the proposal by reviewing the report, which describes the design with nine bullet pointed paragraphs. 

“I look at [the design] saying it doesn’t mean very much to me,” Jones said.

Town Manager Tom Hall estimated the cost of the project to be $170,000 while Jones said Councilor Shawn Babine believed it could be much more. Jones said the committee considered cost savings by using less expensive materials – concrete instead of granite – but did not prepare a final estimate for the project. 

Hall said he and Public Works Director Mike Shaw are in the process of applying for a Community Development Block Grant to fund the project, and, according to the Pine Point Residents Association, money could also come from other sources outside the town budget.

“We will be requesting a more detailed cost analysis, including the contribution required of the developer of the [Beach Walk] subdivision,” the group’s email read.

Ultimately, Jones said the committee’s work was about more than putting together a plan for the future of the area. 

“The goal was not just to gain consensus on this design,” she said. “It’s in the best interest of the community to bring all these groups together.”