Staff Writer 

According to Gorham Town Manager David Cole, communities in the greater Portland area will never be able to sink enough money into their roadways to keep traffic flowing. 

“It’s like being on the deck of the Titanic and saying, ‘Well, we’ll move our chairs back so we will have a few more minutes,’” Cole said during a regional meeting of the Portland Area Comprehensive Transportation System, or PACTS, last week. “It’s a death spiral either way.”

The analogy is Cole’s reaction to a PACTS Regional Collector Road Assessment Study that considered approximately 200 miles of urban collector roads in the greater Portland area. Portland Area Comprehensive Transportation System Director John Duncan said urban collector roads funnel local traffic from residential areas to larger streets called arterials. Examples of an urban collector roadway include Route 77 in Cape Elizabeth and Scarborough, coastal Route 9 and a majority of Route 1, Duncan said.

“I was surprised to find out that Route 1 was an urban collector but in many places, Yarmouth for example, its main purpose is to get people to the interstate,” he said. 

Of the 200 miles of urban collector roads included, the study identified $250 million worth of asphalt that needs reconstruction, rehabilitation, redesign or repaving to meet state standards. Tom Gorrill of Gorrill-Palmer Consulting Engineers in Gray, said less than half of the roadways – approximately 80 miles -– can be brought up to state standards in the next 10 years, if local municipalities and PACTS can devote an annual $5 million to the effort. 

Duncan said the regional entity currently devotes half that amount – $2.5 million – to road maintenance and improvement projects each year. Although Duncan said PACTS was recently involved in helping procure $50 million in Maine Department of Transportation funds for the Veterans Memorial Bridge connecting South Portland and Portland, he does not know how to double the collector road commitment. Any surplus in the annual PACTS budget, dependent on a $5 million state subsidy and approximately $2.5 million from community assessment fees, is often devoted to projects that exceed their initial estimates, but only up to 125 percent of the original cost, Duncan said.

“We help the [Maine Department of Transportation] with the public input process and the design and layout of projects,” Duncan said. “Also, [Maine Department of Transportation] may spend federal dollars in our region if, and only if, they have the support of PACTS.”

Suggestions from PACTS Policy Committee members to help fill the $2.5 million road maintenance gap included obtaining funds through a regional bond or adding urban collector roads to the state’s list of capital improvement projects. 

“Major collector roads are already included in the state’s capital improvement plan, and they are responsible for maintaining those assets,” Portland Engineering Manager Katherine Earley said. “The fact that urban collectors aren’t included – there’s a huge gap there.”

When it comes to receiving federal assistance, Duncan said communities in greater Portland are expected to receive $10 million for infrastructure projects through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, an amount of funding Biddeford City Manager John Bubier considers insufficient given the local need.

“We have to start thinking differently and get out of the box. At this stage of the game I don’t think a standard solution is going to work so well. The federal government is thinking outside, but they’re in the wrong box,” he said.

Gorrill said the cost of meeting state transportation standards could increase exponentially if roadways degrade to the point where they require complete reconstruction.

“It’s a pretty bleak outlook,” PACTS Chairman and Cumberland Town Manager Bill Shane said. “To ask municipalities to take on the cost – it’s a tough issue we face.”

Some communities are already shouldering the cost of road maintenance; Cape Elizabeth Town Manager Michael McGovern said the town council has already allocated more than $400,000 to help repave sections of Route 77, a road that normally falls under the PACTS funding umbrella. 

“It was better for us to do it, economically, now, because it was so far down the PACTS list,” he said. 

“We don’t expect any funding because we don’t have the traffic counts.”

McGovern suggested municipalities that have chosen to take the initiative on road maintenance should be offered compensation either through additional PACTS funding or “points” toward other projects in the town. Duncan said the concept of rewarding local action – which could save money in the long run – hasn’t been discussed before but was well received by a majority of committee members.

“Saco has been doing surface road management for a number of years,” Saco City Administrator Richard Michaud said. “The notion of using local tax dollars on state roads will be phenomenally hard to sell.”

Ultimately, committee members agreed to continue to explore options to acquire additional funding, although at least one town official was already having trouble staying positive. 

“We have never been committed to maintenance in this country. It’s always been expand, expand, expand. Two-hundred and fifty years of that kind of mentality is coming to a head,” Scarborough Town Engineer Jim Wendell said. 

“We are going to have to take road systems out of service or don’t use them. Those are the kinds of things we need to do. I’m tired of wasting time. I’m spinning my wheels here.”

Bubier was more positive about the future of southern Maine’s road system.

“We all thought it was over in the seventies, then again in the eighties. We’ve been here before” he said. 

“There has been a major way in how things have changed. Now there is a much more healthy give and take between different [government] branches.”