Frye Islander wary of parking lot proposal

I would be interested to know how many of Frye Island’s 500 homeowners favor the proposed Raymond Cape parking lot and ferry-queuing road advocated by

Frye Island’s leaders to address ferry traffic congestion on Cape Road. There may be more Frye Island residents who agree with the position of our good neighbors living on Raymond Cape and disagree with Frye Island’s municipal leadership regarding this proposed project.

Frye Island town manager Wayne Fournier warns of an ever-increasing traffic hazard on Cape Road when another 250 houses currently allowed for Frye

Island are actually built. Real estate on the island is moving slowly, so perhaps we can set aside this concern for the foreseeable future.

Before the Raymond Planning Board further considers this proposed Frye Island taxpayer-funded parking lot and queing road, and Cape residents are forced to spend more time organizing in understandable opposition to it, could we consider an alternative to address traffic safety concerns?

Why don’t we ask the appropriate transportation authority to post a 10 mph speed limit prior to the Cape Road curve that precedes the current ferry access road? If that isn’t adequate, perhaps another sign can be posted warning drivers of blind curves and that a sudden stop is possible owing to traffic congestion. Put lights on the sign that flash when a back-up occurs. Frye Island residents already know better than to zip down Cape Road, particularly near the ferry access road. We know that the traffic backs up on Cape Road prior to the ferry approximately 12-14 days per year.

And for these 12-14 days per year, it seems a terrible waste to build a parking lot and ferry queuing road. I agree with Frye Island selectman John Nun – most people bound for the island will not park their cars in this new parking lot to ride the ferry as pedestrians or on a golf cart. Often, people going to the island need to drive their cars to their cottages because they have children, groceries, supplies, animals, etc., with them.

As a Frye Island homeowner, I would prefer not to erode Raymond Cape’s environment with this project and I don’t even want to pay for a needs-assessment study when common sense and simple observation serve to show that this project is unnecessary.

I would rather that Frye Island’s leaders spend municipal tax dollars buying lots on the island to leave them undeveloped. Or, save the money for when we need a new fire engine.

Therese Gibson

Frye Island

Roberts’ diagnosis on target

In one column, Rick Roberts put in perspective exactly the state of what our “Health Industrial Complex” has wreaked upon our citizens. His own experiences explain concisely the dilemmas of a costly and bloated bureaucratic leviathan. My own numerous experiences of billing errors, over-charging and presciption errors, confirms to me that our country has the worst and most costly health care system of developed countries in the world. One thing is certain – health care for profit doesn’t work well for the population at large.

Peter Bollen

Bridgton