Seaside parking

 Board paves way for Prouts Neck lot

As Rick Davies denounces plans for a 370-vehicle parking lot off Black Point Road, being built to provide public access to the Scarborough shore, project sponsors look on, including, from left, attorney Rick Shinay, landowner Seth Sprague, and engineer Terry DeWan. 

After four months of public meetings, including a May 11 session that filled four hours overflowing with public outcry, the Scarborough Zoning Board of Appeals has OK’d a “special exemption” that could put nearly 400 cars on Prouts Neck.

The plan, submitted by Black Point Resource Management, LLC, as agent for property owner Sprague Corp., calls for turning a 62-acre field off Black Point Road into a parking lot for 370 vehicles, from which the public will be able to access a 1,700-foot-long stretch of Sprague-owned beach, near the 2,100-foot-long Scarborough Beach State Park, which is managed by Sprague Corp., but is separated from it by a section of private property.

“It will open up that section to public beachgoing,” said Town Planner Dan Bacon, on Monday.

The proposal will now go before the Scarborough Planning Board, at a date not yet determined. Residents, many of whom are displeased with the Sprague’s proposal, will then get another opportunity to weigh in on the plan.

“It’s going to be a big party down there,” said Edith Iler, whose home would end up sandwiched between the state park and the new beach. “The shortest way to the beach from the western side of that new parking lot will be right down our driveway and then across our porch.”

Iler was just one of 72 people who turned out for the May 11 meeting, almost all of whom opposed the project. Their voices joined roughly 580 letters received by the town since Dec. 20, when Sprague first submitted its proposal, although town officials note that some 400 of those letters came in two separate 200-letter blasts of identical form letters.

The project was made possible by a zoning change enacted by the City Council almost one year ago to the day (May 5, 2010) that relaxed rules in the town’s “rural farming zone.”

Among a host of changes, those rules created a special exemption for outdoor recreation, described by Town Planner Dan Bacon as “creative land uses to keep land open, and not developed as new neighborhoods.”

According to Bacon, in the 1970s, Scarborough enacted strict zoning rules for agriculture. In more recent years, as values have shifted, there has been a drive to relax some of those rules, with an eye to keeping land open. Beginning in early 2009, the Comprehensive Plan Implementation Committee (CPIC) began debate on a host of changes, including the right of the zoning appeals board to allow a special exemption from the rules for so-called commercial outdoor recreation.

“Some of the ideas talked about by the committee were cross-county skiing, or biking, where property remains partially wooded, but the landowner could make some money off of it,” recalled Bacon. “I wouldn’t say this type of proposal was envisioned from the start, but there is some latitude for the zoning board to make that determination.”

Although a host of arguments were thrown up by abutters and other interested parties, particularly fans of the endangered piping plover shorebird, the zoning board ruled that the use proposed by Sprague fits the criteria for “outdoor recreation,” even though the beach, where the primary recreating will take place, is in the shoreland zone, not the rural farm zone. Playgrounds, walking paths and picnic areas fit the letter of the law, the board decided.

After the May 11 meeting, a number of audience members pointed out that the attorney representing Sprague Corp. principal Seth Sprague is Rick Shinay, of the Portland firm, Drummond Woodsum. Shinay, they noted in conspiratorial tones, is a member of Scarborough’s CPIC group.

“I am a CPIC member and was involved in the zoning changes that were debated and presented to the town council,” Shinay said Tuesday. “But I did not begin representing Sprague (Corp.) until mid-December 2010.”

That was eight months after the council approved the zoning changes Sprague was able to use to its advantage.

A number of objections were raised by abutters and their attorneys, including questions of title, pollution, noise and traffic safety, as well as the proximity of an unexcavated colonial fort. In each case, said board Chairman Mark Maroon, those questions would fall before the town Planning Board, and other state agencies, such as the departments of Transportation and Environmental Protection. 

“We are not deferring out authority to anybody,” said Maroon. “We are merely recognizing that there are often multiple stages in a process. The next step is more complicated and more intense than our requirements.”

In the end, the board agreed that, by eliminating Sprague proposals for campfires and barbeque pits, and by cutting the number of parking spots to 370 from the original request of 500, it met the needs of abutters, “as reasonably as can be, based on the realities of out world.”

As conditions for approval, the zoning board stipulated that all berms and plantings designed to keep the lot from view of abutters must be in place within two years from the start on construction, while habitat restoration most be complete in the first year. The beach, which will be open from 9 a.m. to sunset, from May 1 to Oct. 15, must include a section reserved for surfers, and must include restroom facilities “comparable to Scarborough sports fields.”

Sprague also must retain use of the current 140-space overflow lot for the state park, across Black Point Road, and cannot apply for additional spots for “two full seasons” have passed.