Cape path opens, finally

New $1 million Shore Road trail opens after years of community effort

  

Brendan Guthrie and Hadley Mahoney, both age 6, were
among the dozen of children who decorated Cape
Elizabeth’s new Shore Road Path with chalk drawings during
dedication ceremonies Monday. 

CAPE ELIZABETH — Peter Clifford said he’s lost count of the “very close calls” he’s had over the years while jogging with his dog on Shore Road in Cape Elizabeth. The narrow, twisty lane has been called, he said, “the most dangerous road in town.”

“It used to be that you were almost taking your own life in your hands if you were out walking or running on Shore Road,” said Lisa Hansen.

Three years ago, Clifford and Hansen joined Safe Access for Everyone, a grassroots group dedicated to raising local matching funds to build an off-street walking path along Shore Road. But the dream of giving pedestrians someplace other than the road’s narrow shoulders to walk goes back further than that. The town’s 2007 comprehensive plan envisioned just such a pedestrian pathway. Five years before that, the Town Council was juggling ideas for road improvements. Even as far back as two decades, a bicycle path was a hotly debated, and narrowly defeated, topic of debate.

But on Monday, the long road to safe access came to an end with the dedication of Shore Road Path, a $1 million paved trail that leads from Cape Elizabeth Town Hall to Fort Williams Park. For the nearly 200 people who attended the ceremony, the event capped what Town Council Chairman Sara Lennon called, “two zillion man hours of dreaming, scheming, negotiating, drawing, begging and digging.”

“It just seems miraculous,” said Clifford. “We never thought we’d get here but the whole community really pulled together and now we have this safe and wonderful path that’s been created without changing the character of the road at all, with all its big, leafy trees. Everyone really seems to love it.”

“God, look at all the people,” agreed Town Councilor Dave Sherman, as he surveyed the crowd. “This is pretty exciting. It’s awesome.”

“This is an incredible, exciting day that follows a lot of hard work by a lot of people,” said Lennon. “We are truly celebrating a collective achievement that I think we can all agree has changed this community for the better.”

“There’s something a lot bigger than just a pathway going on here,” said Safe Access leader Rory Strunk. “There’s been just an upswell in pride that everyone can feel connecting all of our neighborhoods together. For all of our lifetimes and hundreds of years thereafter, this will be here, for people to enjoy,”

For Mary Ann Lynch, credited by Town Manager Michael McGovern as “the one person” most responsible for planting seeds going back 20 years that led to the path’s creation, the walkway is Cape’s answer to Portland’s Back Bay path around Baxter Boulevard.

“How much use that gets was really my inspiration for this,” she said. “I believe that like the Back Bay, there will come a time when it will be incomprehensible to people that there wasn’t a path here.

Lynch jokingly referred to the long buildup to Monday’s unveiling as “a nanosecond in government time,” adding that good things come to those who wait.

“I initially supported the bike path plan in the early ‘90s, but what we have here today is so far superior to that,” she said. “Out of that failure came something that is so much better.”

Among the first walkers to arrive at Fort
Williams Park Monday following a community
 trek from the start of the new two-mile-long Shore
 Road path at the town officer were, from left,
Michelle Spencer with dog Ollie, Casha Kerney
with dog Chloie, and Jim Tasse, from the Bicycle
Coalition of Maine. 

Although various plans were bandied about through the years, the iteration that led to the path unveiled Monday began with a 2007 comprehensive plan recommendation adopted by a 6-1 vote of the council, and a subsequent committee led by Paul Thelin that included residents Dena DeSena, David Backer, Cynthia Dill, Josef Chalat, Howard Littlefield, Andie Mahoney, Suzanne McGinn, George Morse and Bill Nickerson.

“This group spent thousands of collective hours discussing priorities, reviewing designs, carving out compromises and meeting with every abutter along Shore Road to both educate and listen,” said Lennon.

A $35,000 grant from the Portland Area Comprehensive Transportation System secured expertise from Oest Associates for engineering, Statewide Surveys for wetland mapping and Mitchell & Associates for design.

The Safe Access group eventually raised $104,000 – an “astonishing” feat at the height of the recession, said Lennon – while the Town Council committed $60,000 from a town center sidewalk account, $75,000 from Cape’s infrastructure improvement fund, and $26,000 from a 2008 bond.

What really made the project go, however, was last year’s award of a $729,000 federal grant dedicated to pedestrian and bicycle safety, as funneled through the Maine Department of Transportation Quality Communities Program.

Dan Stewart, the bicycle and pedestrian program manger for MDOT, said the Quality Communities program generally doles out $7 million in each two-year cycle, for which it gets $45 million in project requests from around the state. Last year, however, there was only $1 million available, and the Shore Path was the only project funded.

“It’s a big decision deciding who gets funds. There’s no doubt about it,” said Stewart. “From our perspective, this project is really important for public safety and economic development. When you build these types of projects, people want to live in these communities, and that’s good for business.”

A big part of what put the Shore Path on the department’s front burner, said Stewart, was the “incredible example” it presented of a local community turning out to support a project.

“This project would not have happened without the support of the community,” said Town Planner Maureen O’Meara, credited with finding and applying for the state grant. “It’s a classic example of how government is here to help people, but government can’t do it without the support of the public. This wouldn’t have happened without them.”

But, as Lennon noted, that support was about more than just fundraising and turning out at Town Council meetings. In her remarks at Monday’s ceremony, Lennon reserved special thanks for “the Mitchell and Mahoney clans,” who recognized political realities on the ground.

“These were families that, with five-minutes notice, could turn out an entire village of beautiful blond-haired children who would gather and bicycle, jog, skateboard, rollerblade, dog walk, baby stroll and cartwheel up and down Shore Road for the amount of time we needed if there was even a rumor that an MDOT representative might just possibly be traveling to the town center that morning,” said Lennon.

Lennon also called out John Mitchell, recipient of this year’s Ralph Gould Award for exceptional service to the community, who, in his design work, “got to know every rock stump and bush along the entire two miles of the Shore Road path.”

“He designed and redesigned and redesigned to accommodate evolving needs and came up with a design that basically everyone was able to embrace,” said Lennon.

According to Mitchell, the entire path was built without a single taking by eminent domain. The entire two-mile stretch runs along the existing town right-of-way, or where public easements were granted by private landowners. Sherman acknowledged Monday a slight kerfuffle last fall when the Town Council tried unsuccessfully to get an easement from the Cape Elizabeth Land Trust though a small section of the Robinson Woods. The hope had been to save several trees. In the end, about 40 came down to make room for the path, but, as Sherman noted, “I have not heard or noticed anyone who has said it’s made any difference in the appearance of the road.”

Town Public Works Director Bob Malley, instrumental in overseeing construction work done by Cape contractor L.P. Murray & Sons, said the plan is to make the 5-foot-wide trail a “four-season path.” Although a specific amount had not yet been budgeted for maintenance, plans call on plowing the path as a “secondary sidewalk” within 48 hours of each snowstorm.

Malley said there is still some work left to do on the path, including installation of one “big-block retaining wall” and a bridge at Pond Cove. However, the schedule calls for the entire project to be “wrapped up by the end of next week,” he said.

“There have been a lot of twists and turns in the process. I wish it hadn’t taken this long but in the end we got a really good product,” said Sherman. “Best of all, you can see from who is using the path already, young and old, that it is connecting neighborhoods that never had connections.”

“We are seeing everyone use it of all ages,” said Clifford, “from little kids that used to be ‘landlocked’ in their neighborhoods, now going out to meet their friends, to families walking with young kids and dogs, and elderly people walking hand-in-hand, feeling like they are safe now.

“There are people on it every day,” he said.

And while that is contentment for some, others already are looking to replicate the path-making process.

“There will be another one of these somewhere down the line,” said Strunk. “We’ll all need to band together again and remember that, when we come together as a community, we can make things happen.”