Damariscotta's Charette Conveners

image: 

The town of Damariscotta has just completed it’s charette, which is defined as an intensive period of design. About a year ago, the Damariscotta Planning Advisory Committee, with funding from the Orton Family Foundation, joined with the town and Friends of Midcoast Maine to form a venture with the mildly nauseating name of Damariscotta’s Heart and Soul Project. Their worthy purpose was to strongly involve the community in planning the future growth and development of the town. This is not to imply that there was no extant plan, but anything can be improved. A special incentive was added by the imminent Piper Village development currently planned to involve about 270 acres of the town, a significant percentage of the township. The foundation money was used to seek assistance in this process and the consulting firm of B. Dennis Town Design was chosen.

I attended several of the meetings held October 22-26 and was pleasantly surprised by what I found. Attendees, and there was a goodly number, were earnest and cordial. The consultants were very well prepared with many maps showing different aspects of the community (e.g. parkland, wetland, development, roads etc.) They were also extremely innovative and artistic in their presentations, especially at the wrap-up. The developers of Piper Village, who have made a sincere effort to work with the town were represented and candid in responding to questions regarding their plans.

All in all it was a warm and fuzzy affair. Excellent suggestions emerged for making Damariscotta a much nicer place to live and work. I was impressed with a plan for converting the dismal parking lot along the river into green space with shops or community centers, somehow with no loss of parking. There are proposed walking trails and bike paths throughout, encouraging less use of the demon automobile. Maps were prepared showing circles around proposed parking concentrations to indicate where the public could easily walk or bike The planning even touched, albeit lightly, my personal bete noir, the heavy trucks passing through on Main Street, suggesting an alternate route for reaching the Bristol Road.

The problem is that, desirable as it may be, a lot of what was proposed won’t happen. There are two reasons. First, we will never have the money. We haven’t even been able to raise the funds to put the steeple back on the Baptist church, though everyone would like to see this accomplished. The condition of School St. and Biscay Rd., both involved in the Piper Village development (and the truck bypass), has reached a point of deterioration where I will no longer bike on them; too dangerous. The Commissioner of the state Department of Transportation recently visited the Damariscotta selectmen and apologized that these roads have not been fixed because it would require a complete renovation for which there is insufficient funds. They are, basically, paved buckboard paths on which any simple restoration is quickly transformed to a lacework of potholes.

More significantly, although we give lip service to increasing pedestrian and bike travel, we are addicted to the automobile. I was recently in Belgium which is awash in those quaint, picturesque towns where the houses are close together and there are lots of walkers and bikers. One evening we were invited to visit a family. Father and son walked to the barge to meet us, walked us all over town describing the buildings and architecture, walked us to their home for coffee, to the pub for a brew, and finally back to the barge. Walk, walk, walk. Lovely; but I cannot imagine that happening here. Not unless we make the roads too narrow for cars. My bike, incidentally, was the only one on view outside Great Salt Bay school where the charette wrap-up was held.

Bill Bryson has a short piece in I’m a Stranger Here Myself entitled “Why No One Walks.” He points out that a study at the University of California at Berkeley found that the average person in the United States walks less than 75 miles a year, barely 350 yards a day. “Eighty- five percent of us are ‘essentially’ sedentary and 35 percent are ‘totally’ sedentary.” Please pass the car keys.