BRUNSWICK

During a relatively brief meeting Monday, town councilors tabled a request for additional bus stops, approved one zoning change and set a public hearing for another, and then voted to tear down the old Times Record building on Industry Road.

Councilors tabled a citizens’ request for four additional “flag” stops on the Brunswick Explorer bus route, saying they weren’t comfortable with the amount of ambiguity that remained after the hearing’s conclusion. Additionally, Brunswick Police Capt. Mark Waltz told the council he was worried that one of the proposed stops — at the intersection of Federal and Green streets — was in a dangerous location. No stop sign exists there, which means that traffic would continue to flow around the stopped bus or back up behind it, Waltz said.

The other three locations — Jordan Avenue and Federal Street, School Street and Park Row, and Mill and Maine streets — received lukewarm approval. However, one resident called for the bus program either to be completely revamped or scrapped altogether.

Melinda Gale, who lives in the neighborhood of Church Road and McKeen Street, doesn’t own a car and uses the bus to get to Cook’s Corner — except when she walks because the bus schedule is so clunky, she said.

“The whole thing needs to be revised entirely,” Gale said. “I don’t like the service at all. It’s an absolute waste of time, it doesn’t serve anybody on a fixed income. There need to be more buses in more areas, two or three separate routes.

“It’s a half-hour from Cook’s Corner to the Hannaford (on Maine Street),” Gale continued. “I would consider working this winter in the stores at Cook’s Corner, but the stupid bus doesn’t run on Saturday or Sunday and that’s when (the stores) need people to work. So I don’t have anything good to say about it at all, except to say that it exists.”

District 4 councilor John Perrault wondered why two of the three proposed stops were so close together, and chairwoman Joanne King worried that if the new stops were approved the council would be flooded with requests for even more stops.

The council voted 6-3 to table the issue until more work could be done, even suggesting that the Brunswick Downtown Association be asked to consider the issue.

In other business, councilors approved a zoning change increasing the maximum footprint of residential development to a maximum of 10,000 square feet. Planning Board chairman Charlie Frizzle said the amendment reflects a change in the development and housing market and will help decrease the town’s population density in the affected areas.

The vote approving the change was 7-1, with At-Large councilor Benet Pols opposed and Perrault, a building contractor, abstaining.

A public hearing was scheduled for Oct. 1, at 7 p.m., to discuss a proposed zoning change reaching along Federal Street from Mason to Center streets. The town needs the change so it can swap the current town office building at 28 Federal St. for land at the corner of Stanwood and Pleasant streets, owned by the Brunswick Development Corporation, where the new police station is to be built.

Without the change BDC doesn’t want the building, which means the town either would have to buy the land back from BDC or scuttle plans for its new police station, and neither option is appealing to the town.

Councilors accepted a bid of $138,751 from Copp Excavating in Durham to knock down the former Times Record building on Industry Road. The building costs the town $50,000 annually to heat, said Town Manager Gary Brown, because of the fire suppression sprinkler system inside. It currently is being used for storage; all of the items inside either would be transferred to cold storage at the former Jordan Acres School, to warm storage in a building on the former Navy air base, or outright disposed of.

District 2 councilor Ben Tucker worried that the demolition bid — less than half the price quoted by the highest bidder — was too low.

“I think it’s really a reflection of the time of year, of the current times, and a company simply wanting to put some people to work in the last months of 2012,” Brown said.

Money to pay for the wrecking and removal will come from the town’s Special Revenue Account.

jtleonard@timesrecord.com