Cape committee calls for cap on home rentals

CAPE ELIZABETH — There may soon be fewer weddings in Cape Elizabeth.

The town’s ordinance committee Friday morning ended four months of debate on the issue of so-called short-term homes rentals by calling for a 12-person cap on the number of people allowed to stay in a single-family residence offered for rent on the open market. The limit, which applies only to homes on lots of less than 30,000 square feet (0.69 acres), also restricts the number of visitors to half the number of renters, for a maximum of 18 people who can be present at the rented home at any one time.

That, town officials admit, would effectively end the practice of renting out to wedding parties the cottages in Cape Elizabeth’s more crowded shorefront communities.

“You can still have a wedding, it will just have to be a pretty intimate one,” said Town Planner Maureen O’Meara, after the meeting.

Although more than 35 homes in Cape have been offered for rent, primarily on the website homeaway.com – at rates from $1,000 to $11,000 per week – the complaints that flooded the town office this past summer focused on a home at 5 Sea Barn Road. Town officials say that home is rented virtually every weekend, sometimes for weddings large enough to require busing guests into the congested neighborhood, for lack of on-street parking.

The new zoning rules will be taken up at the Feb. 13 Town Council meeting, at which time they will be immediately referred to the Planning Board for review, according to Town Manager Michael McGovern. It could be June before the ordinance arrives back on the council table and August before it’s adopted, to take affect 30 days later.

However, Councilor David Sherman warned homeowners against going bonkers by booking as many large groups as they can before the size-limit hits.

“That’s probably going to cause the council and the Planning Board to go the other way,” he said, intimating the next step could be to declare home rentals to be bed-and-breakfast operations subject to businesses regulation.

While most of the renters present at Friday’s meeting appear resigned to the new rules, some Cape residents appear ready to stage a fight at the public hearings to come, before both the Planning Board and the council.

Lawson Road resident Frank Luongo said regulating home rentals as a cottage industry only serves to legitimize what has until now been a freewheeling, almost fly-by-night industry. That, he said, will lead to its growth and alter the character of Cape Elizabeth, until it looks more like Old Orchard Beach or Saco – the only other towns in Maine that O’Meara found to have short-term rental ordinances.

“You talking about getting closer to where you need to be on this,” Luongo told committee chairman James Walsh, “but what you’re getting closer to is opening the whole town of Cape Elizabeth to becoming a rental community, and I don’t think that’s where we need to be.”

‘A true community park’

The Mill Creek Park plan offers a new trail system and public garden, but says good-bye to the ducks and a popular bridge.

SOUTH PORTLAND — By this spring, visitors to Mill Creek Park in South Portland can expect to see the first stages of a multi-year, $500,000 improvement project that will link the disparate sections now separated by natural formations, like the brook, and manmade features, like the Greenbelt Pathway and the gazebo.

“There are a lot of nice things there in the park, but not all of them are in the most appropriate places and sometimes things get in the way of other things,” explained City Councilor Tom Coward, at a recent presentation of the final plan that will go out to bid next month.

“This plan sorts all of these things out,” said Coward. “What I particularly like is that it brings into the park the areas along Broadway that are currently cut off, just because of function and flow. When this work is done, I think the park will look a lot bigger than it does now.”

But redevelopment project brings change, and change can mean losses as well as additions. Two things that are not in the long-term future of Mill Creek Park – the bridge that for more than a quarter century spanned the middle section of the hourglass-shaped pond, and the ducks.

The bridge, built by the public works department, was taken out two years ago because of age and structure concerns, just as the master plan process got under way. Councilor Maxine Beecher says she made a promise to her constituents to fight for the bridge’s eventual return.

“That [bridge] is still very much in the heart of the people of this city,” she said, noting its attraction for summer wedding photos, among other things.

But City Manager Jim Gailey says Beecher may not be able to keep her promise.

“It’s a tricky subject at this point and one that I don’t think most people fully understand,” he said.

The problem, Gailey said, is that as a public project, any new bridge would have to meet modern ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act) mandates. That means a slope much shallower than the old bridge, which, with seven steps on either side, was inaccessible to most handicapped people. To meet the 1:12 slope requirements of ADA, the bridge would either have to be excessively long, or have numerous unsightly “kickbacks.” On the other hand, making the bridge a reasonable length would put it low enough to the water’s surface that people would not be able to skate beneath it in the winter, effectively creating two rinks instead of one.

“The overall master plan does include plans for a new bridge,” said landscape architect Regina Leonard, hired both to create and oversee implementation of the plan, along with Sebego Technics of Westbrook and Al Hodson Resurgence Engineering of Portland. “There’s no way that we can replicate it and still have a bridge that everyone can access.  For that reason, it’s not a high priority.”

Meanwhile, the other park feature “very much in the heart of this city” – the ducks – have proven to be too much of a good thing. Over the years, they’ve overrun the 10-acre park, creating as much genuine panic as postcard moments for some park patrons.

“The ducks are doing more bad than good in the park,” said Gailey. “It’s kind of a hot potato, and one that we really haven’t tackled too much.”

Signs were put up last year asking people not to feed the ducks, in hopes they might seek out other, easier sources of sustenance. They didn’t help.

“We haven’t stepped up any kind of enforcement because we really haven’t developed a game plan,” says Gailey. “This is bigger than just moving the ducks. It’s not as easy as putting some signs up and asking police to write summons if people start to feed the ducks.

“The ducks are a conversation people seem just now willing to be able to have,” said Leonard. “For a long time, it was a subject people were unwilling to touch.”

But with ducks and bridges out, what’s in? Leonard says the first phase, scheduled for completion before this year’s Art in the Park festival, is a system of stone-dust trails surrounding the pond and providing access to the new gazebo installed 18 months ago.

                                                                                   

“We don’t want to overwhelm the park with a trail system, but our goal is to better integrate all of the area of the park into a single experience,” said Leonard, noting that trails also will be built to the new military service memorial near Broadway, in what is to be called Veterans’ Green, where landscaping improvements will be made.

“Part of the challenge when we were creating the plans is that the park really feels like three separate areas,” said Leonard.

The new trail system will provide direct access to the pond from Broadway, Ocean Street and Hinckley Street.

A stone retaining wall will shore up the pond’s edge by the gazebo, while new stone pads and benches will be put in at the area known as Mill Stone Plaza, along Ocean Street.

“We hope to create a more urban space with improved access and long, linear views across the pond,” Leonard said.

Future projects include installation of a wrought iron gate at the corner of Broadway and Ocean, leading into a public garden, which, says Leonard, will be the rose garden relocated and “reimagined” with a “sustainable variety of ornamental perennials.”

This, Leonard says, will create a “visual gateway” into the park and a new arboretum that will be part of a later stage of development.

The Mill Creak overhaul will take place in the course of several years, dependant largely on federal funding. Gailey says all of the work will be done using community development block grants, with no direct taxpayer input. Although much depends on how the plan plays out, and support from the community, the expectation now, says Leonard, is a tally of between $400,000 and $500,000 when everything is done.

“This is a true community park,” says Leonard. “We want to make it even more inviting to everyone.”

City sued due to free health benefits

Council still plans to address issue at a workshop ‘sometime in February’

SOUTH PORTLAND — A South Portland man has filed suit against the city of South Portland in Cumberland County Superior Court Jan. 23 regarding the free health insurance given to city councilors.

“My hope is that this won’t cost taxpayers anything, because they’ll concede,” said Albert DiMillo, a retired CPA and occasional Current columnist, who has asked the court to declare the health benefit a violation of South Portland’s city charter.

In 1977, the council took advantage of a 1969 change in Maine law that broadened the definition of "employee" to elected and appointed officials, for purposes of group health insurance policies. Since that time, councilors have received full health care coverage. The city charter, however, fixes the annual compensation for each councilor. Since a 1987 charter revision, that annual stipend has been set at $3,000.

In January 2009, City Attorney Sally Daggett, then newly hired, said that while the charter does fix councilor compensation at $3,000, it does not expressly state that this stipend is to be the "total" value of all compensation, "exclusive of any other benefits."

                                  

“Nobody but an inside attorney could ever pretend ‘compensation’ is an ambiguous term,” says DiMillo.

Councilor Rosemarie De Angelis asked for a second opinion once she became mayor in 2011. In a Nov. 21 memo, attorney William Plouffe, from Portland firm DrummondWoodsum, said that giving councilors health insurance coverage "does not comply with the [$3,000] compensation limit" in the charter. However, given a dearth of relevant case law, Plouffe hedged by adding, "the answer is not free from doubt."

On Nov. 29, DiMillo sent an email to councilors and City Manager Jim Gailey promising to file suit "within a month" if councilors did not freely relinquish their health insurance. DiMillo also promised to go after current and former councilors for repayment of the cash value of any benefits within reach of Maine's statute of limitations – a figure he calculated at $183,680.

Since then, DiMillo has not been the only citizen to dog the council over its health benefits. On Dec. 19, Gary Crosby – a commercial property owner, sometime developer and frequent candidate for public office – presented councilors with 131 names signed to a petition demanding they give up their tax-funded health coverage.

"It's wrong for any sitting legislative body to vote themselves benefits," Crosby said.

DiMillo shares that conviction, noting that when councilors first gave themselves the benefit, it “maybe cost $100 a month.”

“So, they’ve essentially been giving themselves a raise every year, illegally,” he said Monday.

DiMillo, who is representing himself in the Superior Court case, says he dropped his initial demand for restitution.

Gailey was unavailable for comment Monday or Tuesday. City Finance Director Greg L’Heureux, who ran Monday’s council workshop in Gailey’s stead, declined comment.

Mayor Patti Smith did not seem at all phased by DiMillo’s lawsuit.

“He said he was going to do it and he did it,” she said, with a shrug.

Smith intimated she has no more intention of being rushed to a decision now than Nov. 29, when DiMillo issued his first 30-day ultimatum.

DiMillo claims he “never got any reply” to that letter. But when Crosby presented his petition, Smith announced her intent to conduct a council workshop session centered on the health insurance issue “sometime in February.”

“That’s still the case,” she said Monday evening.

Paid permit likely for Pine Point Pier

SCARBOROUGH — “If you build it, they will come,” is a common mantra to anyone with a dream. But once you build it, who will pay to maintain it?

According to the town of Scarborough, which realized its dream of a new municipal pier at Pine Point this past August – after nine years and $800,000 – maintenance costs should fall to users of the new facility.

An update to the Scarborough’s Coastal Waters and Harbor Ordinance, unveiled at the Jan. 18 Town Council meeting, will require a permit for commercial use of the pier, with a fee that could run as high as $300 per year. It also creates a new seven-member committee to oversee use of the facility, including the establishment of rules to confront “safety issues” that have developed in the five months since it opened to the public.

The new ordinance will get a public hearing at the Feb. 1 council meeting, at which time a vote on final passage is expected.

Although not yet set, the permit fee was deemed “fairly modest” by Town Manager Tom Hall. Harbormaster Dave Corbeau said at a Jan. 10 ordinance committee meeting that Saco charges $300 for commercial fishermen to use its pier.

“I don’t think our fee will be that high, but that’s where we’re at,” he said.

The original Pine Point Pier was built in 1971 to give the 15 local fishermen of that era easier access to the boats. However, by 2002, the working waterfront had grown to 66 full-time users, including deep-sea fishermen, lobstermen and clammers. That many people on a narrow, 100-foot-long pier only usable at low tide gave fisherman a two-hour window each day to load and unload their gear.

The new pier, first proposed in 2002, is more than twice as wide as the original and sturdy enough for a fuel truck to drive out the far end to service boats directly. It also has two jib cranes, each capable of moving one ton of product, to save fishermen the backbreaking work of unloading their cargo.

However, the new amenities come with a price, not the least of which is a mandate from the town’s insurer that all crane users receive certified training. That cost, along with routine and future maintenance of the pier, is expected to far outstrip the $1,000 historically appropriated each year by the council.

“I’ve maybe saved some in the past by bringing my own tools and trying to fix things down there, but I really can’t do that anymore,” said Corbeau, adding that fishermen were advised during planning stages for the new pier that a user fee was in the offing.

“They all were in agreement to pay a user fee, rather than having a taxpayer pay for the maintenance down there,” he said.

Funding for pier construction included a $165,000 Small Harbor Improvement Project grant issued through the Department of Transportation and $252,000 from the Land for Maine’s Future program. But the balance – $400,000 – was borne by local taxpayers, who continue to cover the cost of electricity for lights and crane operation.

Corbeau says more efficient systems mean electricity costs appear to be running at less than the $140 per month the old pier costs.

But it’s not all about money. Oversight also is required.

“Anytime we want to add something down there, that shouldn’t be my decision,” said Corbeau, while stumping for the new committee.

The proposed committee, to include five voting members and two alternates, will be tasked with proposing regulations and polices to the Town Council “for the use of waterways, navigational lanes, anchorage areas, town docking facilities and mooring areas,” not limited to Pine Point, although that is the immediate concern.

“We have safety issues down there,” said Corbeau, referring both to commercial use of the cranes and public use of the pier. Too often, Corbeau says, he’s caught people using the new pier as a diving board.

“You just can’t do that, we have 9-foot tides here,” he said, noting that what looks like fun one moment might prove to be a deadly jump only a few hours later.

Hall says another area of concern is the growing number of houseboats along the northeast coast, including year-round residence.

“That’s something we’d like to get some committee work on: if and when we should regulate that,” he said.

Even so, Hall apologized to the council for suggesting a new committee. Already, Scarborough has 29 committees created through the years by the council, which operate to varying degrees of effectiveness. At an annual goal-setting session earlier this year, the council actually voted to look at disbanding some of existing groups.

“Although we were not thrilled about adding another committee, we saw the real need for this,” said ordinance committee Chairman Carol Rancourt. “I think this committee is going to have an interesting agenda in front of them.”