South Portland’s dive team part of effort to protect the waterfront

SOUTH PORTLAND/CAPE ELIZABETH — Two months ago, Officer Peter Corbett of the South Portland Police Department received what may go down as the strangest radio transmission of his career.

On the surface, it may have seemed innocuous enough. Corbett was working a joint detail with Sgt. Andrew Hutchings of the Portland Police Department when the Forest City officer called in to say he’d found a stolen vehicle. What made it strange, though, was that Hutchings wasn’t on the surface – he was below the Maine Wharf, under 25 feet of water.

At the time, dive teams from both sides of Portland Harbor were working together to find Nathan Bihlmaier, a Harvard Business School graduate reported missing and believed to have fallen in the water. Divers had steeled themselves to fide a body. They had not expected to come across a 1994 Cadillac.

“I was working the headset, to keep the divers in contact with the pier,” recalled Corbett. “I was like, a car? Did you just say you found a car? Like, C-A-R?”

Indeed it was. Once Hutchins was able to find the license plate by feeling his way around the car in the murky depth, Corbett called it in to the dispatch center. As it turned out, the Cady was the same one stolen May 10 on Casco Street. Someone, as yet unidentified, pushed or drove it off the pier.

Bihlmaier’s body was found in that same area two days later, in a spot divers has crossed and re-crossed repeatedly. But it’s the car, said Corbett, which will make the first official mission of South Portland’s Dive Team stick in the memory banks.

South Portland formed its four-member dive team four years ago and recently received a Homeland Security grant that will ensure divers for the first time can work in winter weather. It’s all part of recent efforts to beef up security along South Portland’s waterfront, which also includes the purchase of a workboat for the fire department.

“With the number of marinas and petroleum tank farms we have in our community, having no real water access of our own for the fire department was somewhat concerning,” said City Manager Jim Gailey.

The dive team works various details just as important, from searching for bodies – the team trains for rescue, but considers and promotes itself as a recovery unit only – to locating evidence or stolen items tossed in the bay. Evidence recovery alone is why it’s so important to have a dive team made up of sworn officers, Lt. Frank Clark of South Portland said. The team also works plane crashes, such as its second mission, when a small, antique plane hit the water off Portland Head Light last month, and tactical matters they’re less willing to discuss openly, such as training to deal with explosives or drugs that might come into the harbor attached to the bottom hull of boats.

“In today’s world, it just made sense to try and have that capability,” said Police Chief Ed Googins, when recently explaining the department’s Homeland Security grant application to city councilors.

Through the past year, South Portland has begun consolidating its dive team with the six-person crew from Portland police, under a joint memorandum of understanding.

“We each have our own command, but in the water we work as a single unit,” said Clark, the ranking team member. “Because the Portland members have so much more experience, we pair off, one South Portland diver with one from Portland.

In March, Portland won a $1 million Homeland Security grant, of which netted South Portland $95,040. The funding included $76,000 to the fire department for a Department of Environmental Protection-designed skiff being built by Viking Welding and Fabrication of Kensington, N.H., and expected to be delivered this fall, and $19,040 to the police department for dry suits.

In addition to upgrading waterfront capabilities of he fire and police departments, the recent Homeland Security grant purchased various dive equipment, including fins, ankle weights, two underwater cameras and two “lift bags” used to bring evidence to the surface.

The dry suits, which envelop divers in a layer of air, insulating them from frigid temperatures, will enable winter work for the first time.

“Up until now, we’ve been effectively out of the water from December to April,” said Clark.

But that doesn’t mean the dive team has been used to sitting idle for five months of the year. Pool work helps keep skills fresh for team members who train largely on their own time, meeting every month at various coastal locations for eight hours. In all, it takes 96 hours spread across 18 months to go through all the certification modules, taught by South Portland divemaster Paul Rollins, the lone civilian member of the team.

Starting at open water certification, the levels proceed through advanced certification, rescue diving, search and recovery, law enforcement and public safety.

“These men are sincere and dedicated public servants who put in an amazing amount of work just to be ready for the few times per year they may be called upon to use their training,” said Rollins.

“Because it’s not something we do all the time, it’s a matter of maintaining everyone’s competency and comfort, so when we do use that training, each member has that confidence, and doesn’t panic,” said Clark. “Things can and have gone wrong, so we want to feel confident that we can send someone under water who isn’t going to have an issue, or cause an issue for someone else.”

One thing the divers agree on is that diving along the working waterfront is not a place for anyone with claustrophobia, one reason team members trains by blacking out masks and trying to disentangling themselves in rope while in the pool.

“When people think of diving, they think of what they see on TV, with the Caribbean, where you can look up to the bottom of the boat from 100 feet below, and you can see all the fish darting around. Under the State Pier in the Fore River is nothing like that,” said Clark.

“Most times, you can only see a few feet in front of you, and a lot of times not even that,” agreed Corbett. “Still, it is pretty awesome. We’ve all grown up around Casco Bay but its interesting to be one of the few people to be able to see it from the other side, or what you can see of it down there.”

The dive team may also make use of the new fire department work boat. The 24-by-8-foot aluminum skiff, designed by the Maine Department of Environmental Protection, will be used primarily to pull containment booms kept at the seven petroleum storage facilities along South Portland’s 14-mile coastline.

“It’s in no way a fire boat, it’s a work boat,” said Fire Chief Kevin Guimond.

“For the past seven years, I have been working with our waterfront partners on a protection and response plan for a variety of potential emergencies within the harbor,” he said. “One deficiency identified was the department’s ability to fight petroleum fires in a terminal or on a vessel in port. Another deficit was the ability of our first responders to deploy environmental control measures immediately.

“DEP will also be able to utilize this boat at a moment’s notice to get an initial view of any spill in our city, instead of transporting their vessel down from Bangor,” said Guimond.

But the skiff also can be pressed into service as a base of operations for divers in case of an event at one of the marinas. It has been equipped with a “dive door” that allows divers to enter at surface level, without having to go over the side.

“One area of concern is that we have a large number of private vessels on our marinas on a year-round basis – several residents live on their boats 12 months a year – and we have no platform to work off of,” said Guimond, citing fuel and sewage spills, as well as underwater searches, in addition to a boat fire, as possible incidents for which the new skiff would serve as a command center.

In addition to protecting from the cold in winter weather, the dive team’s new dry suits also can be used guard against contaminated water, should an emergency dive be required while contaminants remain in the water.

The fire boat will be mounted with a small water pump, said Guimond, to help battle small boat fires. However, any major waterfront blaze will continue to be fought by the Portland and Casco Bay Lines tugboats, which South Portland equips with firefighting foam, using funding from area oil companies.

It will be a welcome upgrade. The only water vessel now owned by the SPFD is a rubber raft called “The Zodiac,” seized by the police department as evidence more than 20 years ago.

“I spent many hours in the Zodiac,” remarked Councilor Tom Blake, a former firefighter, at a recent council meeting. “One thing I was always sure of was that it was deficient, as far as what we needed to serve our community.”

So long Spurwink

Social service agency leaving South Portland’s Roosevelt School Sept. 1 after 27 years

South Portland’s old Roosevelt School, built in 1927 and
leased by Spurwink Services since 1985, will be empty as
 of Sept. 1 when the mental health and special education
provider moves out to consolidate programs in Portland.

SOUTH PORTLAND — Spurwink Services, a provider of mental health and special education services, has announced it will close its K-10 program at South Portland’s old Roosevelt School effective Sept. 1.

Spurwink has leased the three-story brick building at 317 Pine St. since 1985. However, before the city can focus on future tenants, it first needs to come to terms on termination of the agency’s 20-year lease, which was not due to expire until 2016.

“That’s a lot of what the attorneys are working on right now,” said city Finance Director Greg L’Heureux on Tuesday. “There have been a number of amendments the council has approved over the years and everything has been turned over to the city attorney, Sally Daggett, to sort through.”

Daggett could not be reached for comment Tuesday, but City Manager Jim Gailey said last week that one of the key issues is depreciation of capital improvements Spurwink made to the building, including installation of a roof, an elevator and a new boiler.

“We’re working through the lease right now, with all the re-ups and addendums,” said Gailey, who attended Roosevelt as an elementary student. “Right now, it seems that there are some leaseholder agreements that might need to be paid out based on the amortization schedules.”

In other words, the city might end up paying Spurwink to leave.

“We met yesterday to talk about an exit strategy for the lease,” Gailey said on Tuesday, characterizing the talks with Spurwink officials as “very preliminary at this time.”

According to L’Heureux, Spurwink got to write off the annual depreciation of improvements from its lease, which was set at what taxes would beon the 13,000-square-foot building set on a 1.74-acre lot if it were privately held. Given the $16.10 per $1,000 of valuation property tax rate and an assessed value of $738,300, the lease would have been $11,887 this year. However, L’Heureux notes, the write-offs have made the lease “effectively zero for many years now,” although the agency has paid routine maintenance and upkeep out of pocket.

L’Heureux said it’s “possible” that financial terms of the break-up could be settled by Sept. 1. At some point, Gailey said, the City Council will conduct a workshop to decide future dispensation of the building.

One unlikely prospect, however, is that it might be repurposed as a new City Hall. Officials have looked in recent years to several properties, including the armory, 100 Waterman Drive and Mahoney Middle School, as a place to consolidate city services. However, Roosevelt is too far off the beaten path, said Gailey.

“It’s too soon to say what might happen, but I think City Hall belongs in the central part of the city,” he said.

According to Sonia Garcia, Spurwink’s director of clinical business development and marketing, the Roosevelt school was instrumental to the agency’s success in its early years.

“The Roosevelt School is of historical significance to Spurwink,” she said. “The Roosevelt program laid the ground work for the development of an effective day treatment model for young children with pervasive developmental disorders, including children on the autism spectrum.”

The same year Spurwink opened at Roosevelt, it won recognition from the National Institute of Mental Health as one of 11 “exemplary programs” across the nation. But Garcia said enrollment has been on the decline in recent years.

Now, 22 students are served at Roosevelt, off more than 50 percent from its high, according to Garcia. All of the students will be offered placement in a new children’s wing to be created at Spurwink’s Cummings School in Portland. Spurwink was able to transfer all but two of Roosevelt’s 30 staffers elsewhere within its system, said Garcia.

Most of the loss in enrollment, Garcia theorized, is due to public schools putting a greater emphasis on special education in recent years.

“Public schools have really been sharpening their saws and really finding ways of assisting kids with special needs,” she said. “So, that could be part of lower enrollment.”

But if parents are choosing to place their special needs students in the public schools, local school officials say it’s not because they’re out recruiting.

South Portland Superintendent Suzanne Godin said recently there are 523 individuals in her district receiving special services for at least one identifiable, primary disability. That’s about 17 percent of total enrollment in South Portland.

Treatment for autism, long one of Spurwink’s specialties, has seen an especially rapid growth, up from fewer than 10 students eight years ago, when Godin took the top job in South Portland schools, to 61 today.

“Honestly, we really don’t know what’s driving that,” said Godin, at a recent school board retreat.

“It does seem that a lot of families are looking to bring their kids into the public system in their communities and it’s hurt Spurwink’s elementary program,” said Gailey.

Whatever the reason for the shift, Spurwink still has plenty on its plate. Founded in 1960 with eight special needs boys, the agency now serves more than 5,000 clients – including children and adults with a range of mental health issues – in 20 homes and six special education schools for children age five to 21. It boasts 900 employees,

“In the past few months we’ve been really focusing on a consolidation strategy,” said Garcia. “It’s hard to run all of these schools and so closing this school and moving the children to Cummings just really made good sense.”

While it has been around for a while, there are a lot of holes in the Roosevelt School’s history, according to Kathryn DiPhilippo, director of the South Portland Historical Society.

"The Roosevelt School was built in 1927 and the elementary grades served over the years fluctuated, depending on the city's annual school population," she said last week. But not a lot else is known, DiPhilippo said, including exactly how much time passed between its shuttering as a public school and the day Spurwink came on the scene.

"Our school system is badly in need of research and a book publication," said DiPhilippo.

Voting up for debate

A series of items on City Council procedure headed for future workshop

SOUTH PORTLAND — What could have been a perfunctory round of appointments at the July 16 meeting of the South Portland City Council turned instead into a 20-minute tete-a-tete on Robert’s Rules of Order.

On the agenda were two appointments: Gerard Jalbert as the council’s representative to the Long Creek Watershed Management District board of directors, and former Councilor James Hughes to represent the South Portland Land Trust on that board in the seat reserved for a nonprofit organization.

The meeting turned into a kerfuffle when Jalbert declined to vote for himself, on the belief that it would be a conflict of interest to vote for his own appointment. That prompted a clearly exasperated Rosemarie De Angelis to school her council-mates on Robert’s Rules of Order.

“Somebody doesn’t get to just recuse from voting,” she said. “We’ve been through this a number of times. Let’s do it correctly.”

In May, De Angelis publicly faulted Planning Board Chairman Rob Schreiber for refusing to vote on farmers market applications as a form of protest to the fact that she and other councilors had testified before his panel. Meanwhile, she and Jalbert had been at loggerheads over market issues behind the scenes since March.

De Angelis also has expressed frustration with how the council does business several times in recent months as it’s tried to navigate, mostly in executive session, two lawsuits filed against the city.

A June 25 debate on issues spawned during that time resulted in demands for a series of as-yet unscheduled workshops. Eventual agenda items are supposed to include the use of executive sessions and councilor interaction with city boards and committees, among other items.

Following the appointment argument, Councilor Tom Blake asked that a workshop session also be scheduled on proper voting procedures.

The appointments went forward after De Angelis convinced the council that it first needed to vote on whether Jalbert harbored a conflict-of-interest.

“I don’t see a conflict any more than when you go into the polls when you’re running for election,” she said. “I assume you vote for yourself. I don’t know anybody who doesn’t”

After debating the issue, the council voted 3-3 against allowing him to sit out the vote.

Jalbert was allowed to refrain from voting on that measure, which Councilors Tom Coward and Maxine Beecher supported along with Mayor Patti Smith. The tie vote forced Jalbert to vote on his appointment, which was made unanimously, but only after the board realized it had to first back up and vote to reconsider the first vote it took on which Jalbet had declined to vote.

Councilor Tom Coward suggested that entire parade of parliamentary procedure was prompted mostly by Jalbert’s “false modesty.” However, Jalbert noted that the Watershed District board expects to sign contracts for $10 million-$15 million in work in the next decade.

“I have several business interests throughout the city,” said Jalbert. “The possibility exists that I may have to look at a contract from which I would have to recuse myself. So, I was just being very cautious.”

“In that instance, at that time, that is an appropriate time to ask to be recused,” said De Angelis. “But again, what the rules say is that you first state that you have the appearance of an impropriety, then that you think you can, or cannot, be objective in your vote. Then it goes to the body to decide.”

“But I don’t see what the conflict is here,” said De Angelis. “I think voting is a really important role of a councilor and we should not recuse somebody arbitrarily, which is what this feels like. There may be a conflict in the future, but there is no conflict in this vote.”

In unanimously appointing Jalbert, council members said they did not mind sending him to the Watershed board even knowing that, from time-to-time, he may have to sit out certain contract votes.

“I trust implicitly that Councilor Jalbert will to the right thing when he is on the management district,” said Smith, adding with a laugh, “I voted for myself as mayor.”

Mahoney converting to gas

SOUTH PORTLAND — The South Portland City Council has hired Northeast Mechanical of Portland to convert the two boilers at Mahoney Middle School from No. 2 fuel oil to natural gas, for $126,910. The conversion makes the bus garage on Wescott Road the only school department building to still use heating oil.

The contract was not put out to bid, said City Manager Jim Gailey, because Northeast is the only company in the state certified to work on the Cleaver-Brooks brand boilers at the school, which date to 1989 and 2002, respectively.

The contract includes installation of the conversion equipment for $83,043 and a new chimney lining for $43,867. According to Russ Brigham, the school department’s director of buildings and grounds, the changeover should pay for itself in lower fuel and maintenance costs within “5.7 years.”

Mahoney, built in 1924 and expanded in 1936, was originally heated with coal. The 10,000-gallon oil tank is in what was once the coal room and dates to the mid-1950s.

“It was never registered and has never been inspected until this past fall,” wrote Brigham, in a memo to the City Council. “We now know there are several repairs required.”

City Manager Jim Gailey said that fix has been pegged at $20,000. Moreover, because the tank was sealed into the coal room with concrete blocks, creating a tight area with only one exit in what Gailey calls an “inhospitable environment” with “no safety containment,” the fire department has declared the it a “permit required confined space.”

That, said Gailey, means if the city had chosen to fix the tank instead of converting the boilers to natural gas, additional costs would have been incurred by a mandate that emergency personnel be present on stand-by throughout the process.

The cost to “dismember and remove” the oil tank has been estimated at $12,000.

“I’m going to send that order right away,” said Brigham. “I want to get it out of there and the system converted ASAP to be ready for next season.”