Village vision: Zoning change near Scarborough Downs hopes to encourage mixed-used

SCARBOROUGH — A set of zoning changes put on the table by Scarborough’s long-range planning committee could result in residential development as soon as next year on the 480-acre Scarborough Downs lot while also making way for the creation of a village center.

If approved as envisioned, rules for the new “Crossroads District” would allow as many as 40 housing units per acre in buildings up to six stories high, making them the tallest structures in Scarborough.

In addition to allowing residential development on the Downs property and a wider array of commercial uses, such as assisted living centers and “small-scale energy facilities,” changes also are being considered for two adjoining areas, along Payne Road and next to the Warren Woods.

The new Crossroads zone would continue to allow harness racing and associated betting, though not other forms of gambling. Still, it seems the proposed change may be less about saving Scarborough Downs than preparing for what happens if and when it goes away.

The new development rules are based on a ideas first built into the town’s 2006 comprehensive plan. That document saw in the Down’s property something Scarborough sorely misses. Despite being cut in three parts on parallel paths by Route 1 and Interstate 95, the town has no genuine Main Street, at least not in the New England sense of a village center.

The Crossroads plan hopes to remedy that.

“Redevelopment of the Scarborough Downs property along with development of adjacent land results in a vibrant, mixed-use center for the community,” reads the plan, envisioning a “concentrated and dense neighborhood” surrounded by a mix of small businesses and neighborhoods “in a loose grid pattern” extending to Sawyer Street.

According to Rick Shinay, a member of the planning committee, the new proposals are an attempt to bridge the gap between what exists at the racetrack site today and what the comprehensive plan expects.

“We thought if we don’t try to implement some zoning to react to how development might go there, we’d lose control,” he said.

However, Ed MacColl, attorney and spokesman for Scarborough Down’s owner Sharon Terry, said following a presentation on the concept Monday that it’s unlikely his boss will try and plant private homes around the harness racing site.

“I haven’t heard Sharon say she wants to be a real estate developer,” said MacColl.

Much of the property surrounding Scarborough Downs has been up for sale since November 2011, when the track lost a third attempt to secure voter approval for expanded gambling at the site. MacColl says even though the zoning changes might make the land more attractive to potential buys, it may not be enough to stem the slow, decades-long decline of harness racing, reported by some sources to be off more than 45 percent since 2003, when voters first acquiesced to allowing slot machines at tracks as a way to help save the industry.

Scarborough Downs only uses about 100 acres of its lot, but could make do with as little as 35, said MacColl.

“Even so, selling some land will cover your loses for a while, but eventually the business needs to make sense,” he said.

Shinay said the topic has come back up after his group switched its attention to other matters, such as Haigis Parkway and the Pine Point area, around 2008, when the racetrack was embroiled in one of its attempts to expand gambling operations.

The Haigis and Pine Point efforts have led in the last year to relaxed zoning rules and a near-immediate impact on development, quickly drawing projects to both areas. However, town officials say they did not create the “Crossroads” zoning district for the sole benefit of the sole property owner within its borders.

“This plan doesn’t make any assumptions about the future of the Downs,” said Town Planner Dan Bacon. “It is not predicated on the track staying or leaving or whether casino gambling happens or not.”

“There’s no reason why this is coming up now other than that it’s next on the list,” said Shinay.

Of the 15 residents who attended Monday’s presentation by Bacon, Shinay and Mark Eyerman, a consultant from Portland-based Planning Decisions, changes affecting Sawyer Street seemed to matter more than the future of Scarborough Downs.

The plan calls for carving four landlocked lots totaling some 40 acres out of the “Business-2” zone they now share with Scarborough Downs and putting them in a new “Village Residential” zone. Although Shinay stressed “there is no development plan on those properties that we are aware of,” he noted that traffic from anything that does go up will empty onto Sawyer Street.

“Please think about that,” said Larry Finkleman. “It’s not a wide road. We lose a mailbox now every five or six years.”

Less controversial was a plan to move about a dozen lots located between Payne Road and Interstate 95, from Ginn Road to the Nonesuch River, into a new “Business-3” zone. Rules there would open up possible commercial uses while still banning gas stations and so-called “big-box” stores, said Bacon.

Some residents questioned why a portion of the Warren Woods abutting Payne Road was included in the B-3 zone when the rest of the property, soon to be owned by the Scarborough Land Trust and placed in a conservation easement, is zoned “rural farming.”

Town Manager Tom Hall said no development is planned. The inclusion simply allows the town to build recreational fields there in the future, if it should ever want to, he said.

The long-range planning committee is due to debate issues raised by affected property owners at its next meeting, scheduled for 8 a.m. Friday in the town manager’s conference room at town hall. According to Bacon, any final proposal hammered out by the group could go before the Town Council as soon as “late winter.”

However, that does not mean homes will be going up right away. Development of more than five acres in the Crossroads zone will require what Bacon calls a “broad-brush master planning process” for the entire site, accounting for things like roads, water and sewer.

“Planning is great, but the first bit of brick and mortar requires somebody’s money,” said MacColl, noting the capital needed just to draw up plans for what might one day be the town center.

“Frankly, those ‘soft costs’ are ridiculously expensive,” he said. “Once you start talking lawyers and engineers, you start to spend money faster than you can imagine. It’s just scary.”

Those costs, said MacColl, is why Scarborough Downs is still married to the idea of casino gambling as its means of survival, despite repeated beatings on the subject in the ballot booth.

“In terms of harness racing’s survival, whether it's here or at a relocated track, in the long run there will need to be gaming,” he said. “Selling some land will cover your loses for a while, but eventually the business needs to make sense.

“None of this [residential development] would happen fast and in terms of it helping the harness racing industry,” said MacColl. "I think we’ve got to do something within the next year, or few years, or they’ll be just crushed."

Scarborough woman tries to kills husband

Charged with firing handgun while holding six-month-old baby

SCARBOROUGH — A Scarborough woman is in jail after police said she held her 6-month-old baby while firing a handgun at her husband with the intent to kill him Saturday night.

On its Facebook page, the Scarborough Police Department said Angela Haddad, 34, a resident at the West Oak Apartment Complex on Pin Oak Drive fired a .357 round at her husband during an argument.

“She admitted to investigating Officers that she wanted to kill her husband. The bullet did not strike anyone and the bullet hole was located in the wall above a rear window,” the post reads.

According to police, Haddad was arrested at 11:45 p.m. Saturday after a neighbor called 911 to say Haddard “had come into her apartment stating her husband was outside with a handgun.”

Haddad was arrested for aggravated reckless conduct “with terroristic intent” and endangering the welfare of a child. She was later charged with violating conditions of release. She is being held at Cumberland County Jail following arraignment at on Monday.

Growing from the sea up

Scarborough seaweed company plans new drying greenhouse as business expands

SCARBOROUGH — It seems government regulation can give as good as it can take away.

On Dec. 10, Tim and Kelly Roth, owners VitaminSea, which makes a variety of products from seaweed harvested off the Maine coast, will go before the Scarborough Planning Board with plans to build a new 21-by-96-foot drying greenhouse. The new structure, which will allow the Roths to extend their processing season to grow their quickly growing business, is made possible by recent changes to zoning regulations in the Pine Point area of town.

In September, the Town Council approved changes that, in many ways, rolled back the clock on 1970s-era rules that had stepped in the way of traditional waterfront uses in favor or residential development.

Those changes made the VitaminSea greenhouse a possibility, allowing the Roths to expand a business they are in only because state changes forced them from the fishing industry eight years ago.

“I wouldn’t be dealing in seaweed right now if we could have continued fishing, but rules and regulations kept taking this and taking that,” said Roth, who fished for 28 years, starting in New Jersey and moving to Maine in 1992.

“We had fantastic fishing right up until the end, but it all got kind of pulled away from us,” said Roth, who used long-line techniques, rather than nets. One thing that ruined the trade for him, says Roth, was the need to throw away fish the rules were ostensibly designed to protect. Not using a net meant not dragging in whatever was out there, but sometimes pulling a fish up on a line would give it “the bends.” If that fish happened to be outside approved parameters, by size or species, Roth would have to throw it back, even though it had died.

Roth turned in his fisherman’s cap for a captain’s hat, and spent his time manning tugboats in New York. But the new schedule, three weeks on and three weeks off, drove him to distraction.

“My biggest thing is downtime, I have to keep busy,” he said, on Friday, while giving a tour of the company’s production facility in old Snow Canning plant on Pine Pint Road.

The road to that location, and the greenhouse to be built outside it, began when Roth used capital from the sale of his two fishing vessels to buy a small boat with an outboard motor for harvesting seaweed. What started as a hobby and the sale of two 30-pound bags for $10 turned within two months in 200 bags a week sold to lobster dealers for $6 each.

“It was just me and a little rake, pulling it into my little board and bagging it up, but if I filled 50 bags a day I made $300,” said Roth. “It was a real workout, but I was loving it.”

Before long, the Roths joined the Maine Seaweed Council, a group founded in 1993 that has developed many of its own biodiversity studies and member rules on harvesting rather than wait for regulations to be handed down by the Department of Marine Resources.

“This has been a sleeping industry,” said Roth. “You don’t hear that much about it and I think they like it that way.”

Eventually, the Roths decided to diversify into production, making and selling many of the things seaweed can be sued for, rather than to focus solely on supplying one type to the lobster industry.

Today, VitiminSea has 52 different products, including seasonings and crunch bars made from edible varieties, plus pet and horse supplements, soaps and fertilizers. 

The company harvests 200 tons of rockweed each summer for its feed line, with nine contracted employees. Since expanding to edible products about a year ago, the Roths expect to more than double to $100,000 their annual revenue.

In addition to the popular SeaCrunch, VitaminSea’s product line includes a blend of flaked dulse and sea salt called Sea’sonings, along with a selection of products made from sugar kelp, kombu, wakame and bladderwrack among other seaweed varieties.

“Sea vegetables are so packed in nutrients,” Roth said. “It’s just a powerhouse.”

The kelp used for many of the edible items are sun-dried in season on tables at a 10-acre farm the Roths own in Scarborough. They live in Buxton. In addition to extending the season, the greenhouse will allow the Roths to keep edible seaweeds undercover while drying, at a spot close to the production facility in the old canning plant, which VitaminSea shares with 10 other companies.

Henry Pelletier, who bought the old Snow plant and now manages the building for Blue Cold Distributors, owned by his daughter, and its other tenants, says expansions there are thanks to the town’s rezoning efforts.

"It's probably been the best result I've got from the town since I came here in 1995," he said. “"I think it's going to work for a lot of people. You'll maybe see a couple other people now who, because of the zoning change, are going to get more involved."

“They are careful,” said Roth of the town. “They’re not just letting any old thing go up here in Scarborough. For them to open up and say we’re going to allow some new development, that’s great.”

Changes included creation of an “industrial overlay district” in the area of the old canning plant, where the town created a new “town in village zone” in hopes of establishing a “walkable community” there. Overlay rules allowed tenants in the canning building to continue and even develop industrial uses without having to seek a special exception from the Zoning Board of Appeals.

“Before, any time you wanted to change anything down here you had to go for a variance. Kudos to the town for recognizing that was waste of everybody's time," said Susan Bayley, owner of Bayley's Lobster Pound.

"We wanted that to be able to continue to be a growth industry," said Bacon. "It's really our only waterfront area that is conducive to the marine industry. The new districts allow for seafood processing and provides more allowances for industries that zoning hadn't allowed for.”

What it hadn’t allowed for was business development and growth. Now, Roth said, his new company has that opportunity.

“We’re just a mom-and-pop shop trying to put out a healthy product,” he said.

Scarborough council sticks with Ahlquist

SCARBOROUGH — It’s new boss, same as the old boss on the Scarborough Town Council, where Ron Ahlquist and Judy Roy were unanimously re-elected chairman and vice chairman, respectively, at the most recent council meeting, held Nov. 28 at the Maine Veterans’ Home on Route 1.

Roy led the council in 2011. She was selected by her fellow councilors as vice chairwoman in 2012.

Roy sat on the Town Council for much of the 1990s and returned to the governing body in 2007. Ahlquist, elected in 2011 to fill the final two years on the term of Councilor Michael Wood, has served similar short terms, in addition to wining regular elections, logging 11 of the last 13 years on the council. The town charter limits councilors to “no more than three consecutive full terms of office.” Because Ahlquist most recently won election to something less than a full term, he may be able to sit for another nine years without a break, if he chooses to run and is elected.

Two new councilors were sworn in Nov. 28 meeting, along with incumbent Jessica Holbrook, who won a second term. Retired IBM manager Ed Blaise, 59, beat out local contractor Paul Andriulli and Maine Medical Center executive Chris Coon to replace Carol Rancourt, who was forced out of office by term limits. Meanwhile, homemaker Kate St. Clair, 35, bested retired attorney Bill Donovan to fill the remaining two years on the term of Karen D’Andrea, who resigned to Aug. 13 to focus on her nonprofit work.

Appointments to lead the council’s finance committee, a post now held by Roy, and the ordinance committee, last chaired by Rancourt, were slated to be made at the Dec. 5 council meeting, which took place after deadline for this week’s Current.