Close to 80 residents showed up for a Maine Department of Transportation hearing Tuesday night on proposed traffic improvements for Dunstan, and despite being asked not to, they focused on the Great American Neighborhood project.

Resident Deborah Greenwich said no matter what is done with the two Route 1 intersections in Dunstan, the area could not support another 500 cars. The Great American Neighborhood proposal is calling for the construction of 441 housing units on 150 acres off Broadturn Road and Route 1 in Dunstan.

Kim Wogan still hasn’t gone back, not really. She left her apartment in Queens a couple days after the terrorist attacks, returning only to pick up her belongings. She came back to Scarborough to live with her parents.

Wogan had already been thinking of moving back to Maine.

But after watching the Twin Towers fall – an inescapable scene from the 15th floor of her office building in Lower Manhattan – she knew where she had to go.

“At that point, I decided that if anything was going to happen, I’d rather be with my friends and family.”

In 2001 the town of Cape Elizabeth was owed $38,400 from

people who had not paid their sewer bills. The usual method for getting payment was putting a lien on the property in question.

Now the town has given the Portland Water District (PWD) the authority to shut off the sewer and water for anyone who has not paid their bill for 50 days and who has a combined water and sewer past due amount of more than $200.

The council voted unanimously at its meeting Monday to make it easier for the town to collect on past due sewer bills. Like most towns in the greater Portland area, Cape has an arrangement with PWD to bill residents and business owners for their sewer use. The PWD then cuts the town a check because the sewer lines are town-owned.

Courtney Ferrell and her husband spent all summer looking for a house near Cape Elizabeth, where she began teaching math and science this year. They were returning to Maine after living in Tucson, Ariz., where they had a nice home with a pool for two years. They finally gave up, unable to find anything in the $150,000 range.

“Cape Elizabeth was never even on my radar screen,” said Ferrell. “Even Scarborough, I assumed, would be out of my reach. People have told me the only houses affordable for me are in Saco or Gray.”

Ferrell isn’t the only Cape teacher who can’t afford to live there. Of the 180 employees in the Cape Elizabeth School District, about two-thirds of them commute to work. Even Cape Superintendent Tom Forcella had to buy a house in Scarborough when he was looking a few years ago because he couldn’t afford one in Cape.

In Scarborough, the percentage of school district employees who commute is much lower, although the number of teachers who commute is high. Of the 520 employees in the Scarborough School District, 318 of them commute. But of the 251 teachers in the district, 177 commute

More golf courses could be built in Cape Elizabeth if town officials decide to approve zoning amendments that would open half the town to such development, a change that would make the Sprague Corp. happy.

The Planning Board is holding a public hearing on Sept. 17 on whether the town should allow golf courses in two residential districts that account for 57 percent of the land in town.

At the Sept. 4 Scarborough Town Council meeting the Maietta brothers, Neil and Vincent, received a congratulatory letter from Gov. Angus King and a plaque commemorating the quick action of the Maietta crew when 3,500 gallons of gas spilled from a tanker trunk on Pleasant Hill Road Aug. 6.

Cape Elizabeth has set up a citizens’ committee to look at how it gets rid of its trash, including the possibility of curbside recycling and trash pickup.

The committee has met twice since being appointed in July and, according to chairman Charles Wilson, it is looking broadly at how Cape takes care of its trash.

“These issues haven’t been looked at since the transfer station was built in 1977,” he said. The town is also looking at the need to refurbish or buy new equipment for the transfer station and before investing money in that process, Public Works wanted to make sure that was the way to go.

Apost-Sept. 11 slump in the trucking industry has put two national trucking companies with terminals in Scarborough out of business. The most recent, Consolidated Freightways Corp., shut down on Labor Day putting 13 people who worked at their Scarborough terminal out of jobs.

Scarborough Fire Chief Michael Thurlow last week laid out his plan to increase firefighters’ pay, improve coverage throughout the town and reorganize some of the department’s administrative and training duties.

It is a sweeping plan, which could cost thousands of dollars a year in additional salary and benefits, but Thurlow told the Town Council at its Sept. 4 workshop the town needs it. Further, he said, it is far cheaper than the alternative: a fire service staffed entirely by full-time firefighters.

“It is inevitable that this community will grow to the extent that we need a full-time department, at some point,” Thurlow said. But in the meantime, there are some changes the Town Council can implement to keep the town’s fire protection level up while still keeping costs at a reasonable level.

Editor’s note: Looking Back is a weekly column including news items reported 10 years ago in The Current, which celebrated its 10th anniversary in September 2011.

A seal is released into Cape Elizabeth’s Dyer Cove on Sept. 5, 2002.