From pit to park

The ribbon is cut on South Portland’s Trout Brook Nature Preserve, completing the property's transformation

SOUTH PORTLAND — Names are powerful things. Take for example the image called to mind by a 7-acre parcel in South Portland described this weekend as “serene,” “tranquil” and “gorgeous.”

Now, consider that same property under its original name – the Sawyer Street Pit.

That name not only applied to the town’s old gravel pit, but to the brook that runs through property, so choked by chemicals, oils, pesticides and phosphorous from stormwater runoff that has leached for decades into the surrounding 1,700-acre watershed that it fails to meet minimum quality standards in the federal Clean Water Act.

On Saturday, accompanied by a round of applause, Jon Dore of the South Portland Land Trust cut the ribbon on the Trout Brook Nature Preserve, including a $9,000 wood-and-aluminum foot bridge spanning Trout Brook and trails newly built using more than 100 cubic yards of mulch. The ceremony marked an amazing transformation for the property, and for the brook, which was at one time toxic and polluted.

Marlene Tordoff, whose South Richland Street property abuts the brook, has watched the site since 1968, heavy excavation equipment regularly gouged into the glacial moraine of what is now a steep embankment for the gravel used to build the surrounding streets, including Providence Avenue, Boothby Avenue, Parrot Street and Sawyer Street.

“This was a working sand pit,” she said, appearing to marvel at the difference. “Public works trucks were in and out of here all the time.”

“This is a revelation, I had no idea this was here,” agreed Willard Beach resident Kathy Stewart, a birder equally awed at the improvements made just since January to what had become in recent decades a tangled undergrowth used as a trash and brush dump when not pressed into service for purposes even less savory.

As project manager for the South Portland Land Trust, Dore has led the transformation of the Sawyer Street Pit into a neighborhood “pocket park” since January, when the City Council released $45,790 from its $467,245 “land bank” built up over time using money from donations and various land deals.

At “about $18,000” spent so far, with a trailhead on Sawyer Street to be added in the spring and interpretive nature signs still to come, the preserve project is roughly $20,000 under budget and, according to Mayor Patti Smith, two years ahead of schedule.

“Initially, we thought this thing was going to take three phases to get done, but it all came together in just one season, and that is because of Jon,” she said. “Jon is a masterful leader. He really rallied the troops and brought things together. Without him, we would not be here this soon exploring these wonderful trails.”

Various entities lent a hand to turn the largely abandoned city-owned lot into a public attraction, including an army of land trust volunteers in six separate work parties that helped build the trails and clear the land of brush and invasive species overrunning the site, like Japanese knotweed, bittersweet, multiflora rose and purple loosestrife. The city parks department hauled that brush away, while Portland Trails donated its expertise (and $1,000).

Custom Float Services of Portland built the 45-foot-long bridge and delivered it for free, while Keeley Crane, also of Portland, cut “more than in half” its price to lift the bridge over power lines and trees to set it in place, said Dore.

But the nature preserve is more than just “a great coming-together of a community,” as Smith termed the recent results. The project also represents the first step at taking the 2.5-mile-long brook – which runs from a wooded area west of Spurwink Avenue in Cape Elizabeth, through South Portland to Mill Creek Park and eventually into Casco Bay – off the state’s official list of “impaired waterways” compiled by the Maine Department of Environmental Protection.

That effort goes back to 1999, when Dore realized what many locals already knew – despite being a small stream that meandered through a highly urbanized area in which more than 60 percent of the lots are categorized by he state as industrial/commercial, and in which impervious surfaces, like driveways and parking lots, account for more than 13 percent of the land area – Trout Brook actually has trout in it.

“When I realized it was supporting fish like this, I knew it was something much more special than just a pretty creek,” said Dore, crediting Smith and Councilor Tom Blake with spearheading the conservation efforts.

With Trout Brook in mind, the land trust created in “inventory of special places,” leading to South Portland’s first Open Space Strategic Plan in 2002. The state had three biological monitoring program stations on the brook in place since 1997, and a fourth in 2000.  In 2006, a study prepared by the state and the South Portland Land Trust, with the help of a citizen’s steering committee at work collecting samples since 2002, identified 86 separate pollution points into the stream, seven of them toxic.

That helped convince the city in 2007 to grant conservation easements to the land trust on its property surrounding the brook, including the old gravel pit. A second citizen committee convened in 2009, eventually delivering in October 2011, the use plan that led to last week’s preserve unveiling.

“For me, this has been nine years,” said Bette Davis, Beaufort Street resident, a committee member from the onset. “Our property abuts the watershed, so of course it means a lot to us to preserve it, so I’m just thrilled to death at what’s been accomplished so far.”

The next steps are to begin work on the brook itself, to try and nurse it back to health. That work got a start in May, when local students released fish into the stream. More importantly, during the last week of September, workers from South Portland’s Water Resource Protection Department, using  a $5,000 grant from the Casco Bay Estuary Partnership, breached manmade berms once installed to stem stream flooding, allowing Trout Brook to overflow into surrounding wetland areas. They also installed woody stream coverings to provide habitat for various insects trout like to eat, and that helped to shade the stream from the sun and disrupt and aerate water flow, giving fish the cool water and high oxygen content they need to thrive.

According to David Critchfield, chairman of South Portland’s Conservation Commission, it's something of a mystery how trout have managed to survive in the stream at all. The leading theory, he says, is that there are a handful of natural springs near the stream bed in the preserve which provide the cool, nutrient-rich environment baby trout like, which they can access in the spring, when the water table is high and the stream is overflowing. That, he says, was partly the reason for the city’s recent stream work.

“We’ve made great strides so far in getting the stream of the impaired list,” he said. “We’ve got a ways to go but I think we’ll make it.”

The important of creating the preserve area, he said, especially given all of the land trust’s volunteer help, is that it demonstrates to various funding agencies that the city is “invested in the process.”


“It’s not like we’re just sticking our hands out waiting for grant money,” he said.

More work to help repair the stream will come. But, for Roberts and Tordoff and other residents living near the new preserve, the thrill is in having an open space that is more than a lurking spot for what Smith calls “nefarious kids,” such as the ones who until recently might litter the site with discarded beer bottles or who, many years ago, actually changed the course of the stream by damming up sections with stones from the nearby gravel pit.

“I wish every neighborhood in South Portland could have a little respite like this,” said Smith. “Whenever there is something like this, it creates a new, good energy that kind of pushes that bad energy out.”