Anne-Marie Davee is working to make Freeport a more active community, and she is getting some help.

Davee, the wellness director at the Casco Bay YMCA in Freeport, is the chairwoman of the town’s Active Living Task Force, which was created by the Town Council earlier this month.

The group, which has yet to schedule its first meeting, is charged with assessing Freeport’s walking, biking and hiking infrastructure and develop an active-living plan that supports the town’s comprehensive plan, with a consideration on finding outside funding to pay for any improvements. The target date for the completion of the group’s work is June 2013.

“We have a town comprehensive plan that has a whole section on active, outdoor recreation that’s already documented,” Davee said. “But this task force can help to move it forward. This is all sort of building conversations, and momentum and energy in the town of Freeport,” she said.

In accordance with the group’s charge to consider financial constraints in making recommendations to the council, Davee said, the task force would work to find outside sources of money wherever it can.

“We may go for grant funding,” she said. “We’ll look to see what other resources can we use to help move the plan forward.”

Town Councilor Kristina Egan, who is also a member of the task force, said the 11-member group was formed after she and other interested parties, which include fellow councilor and task force member Sara Gideon, started spreading the word.

“We put out a bunch of emails to constituents, people who had been interested in (working on active-living initiatives),” Egan said at the council’s Aug. 7 meeting. She said they had also reached out to interested residents through the Freeport Talks website, which is hosted on the town’s official website and is described as an online town hall meeting that seeks creative and practical ideas to make Freeport the best community it can be.

While the target date for the completion of the group’s work is June, Egan said, some recommendations might be finalized earlier so they could be included in the town’s budget process, which begins in the late winter/early spring.

“We probably want to have a draft of some sort of plan in March so it could be considered alongside other capital needs,” she said.

Davee said she was “very excited” when she heard there was an interest in forming a group to look at active and healthy living options in town.

“I have been an active advocate of (bike and pedestrian) initiatives for the past 10 years,” she said.

Egan said Davee deserves a lot of credit for getting the group off the ground.

“She has been an instrumental force in creating this task force,” she said.

Davee said she believed that Freeport already has a large group of residents interested in an active lifestyle, adding that she sees evidence of it on her daily walks. “I see dozens of people walking, biking and running,” she said.

“We need to get all of our towns and communities active for many reasons,” Davee said, including higher gas prices making it more expensive to drive, easing traffic congestion and battling obesity.

“The charge is to increase multi-use trails, active transportation and have more people being out and about and being active. It’s actually a national trend that’s going on across the country, for active community environments to promote walking, biking and more accessible recreation facilities.”

Yarmouth, Brunswick and other surrounding towns have similar active-living groups, according to Davee.

“It’s really a regional (movement),” she said, adding that working with other towns is a longer-term goal of the Freeport group, but for the time being, the task force will concentrate on Freeport.

And Davee doesn’t think it will be all that difficult to formulate a plan to improve Freeport’s active recreational opportunities.

“We have so many resources in Freeport, I think it will be easy,” Davee said, mentioning the trails owned by the Freeport Conservation Trust and the Casco Bay YMCA, as well as Winslow and Wolfe’s Neck parks. “We have all of these wonderful resources that we need to get people to feel safe (using) and for all of these resources to be accessible.”

Anne-Marie Davee, the chairwoman of Freeport’s newly created Active Living Task Force, stands outside one of the trails at the Casco Bay YMCA, where she works as the wellness director.   
This trail at Freeport’s Hedgehog Mountain is among the many resources that the Freeport Active Living Task Force hopes to promote.