CAPE ELIZABETH – At its most recent meeting, the Cape Elizabeth Planning Board tried to tackle a problem nobody knew they had, and one few seemed eager to solve.

At issue are so-called “teen summer camps.” According to Town Councilor David Sherman, who urged his peers to seek out a Planning Board solution, the “camps” are a “long-running tradition” in town in which older teenagers take in younger children, usually ages 7-10, for a few hours each day for three or four weeks in the summer. The camps generally, but not always, have a theme, whether it’s sports, crafts, drama, or some other activity. Parents are charged a fee, but that price reportedly varied from camp to camp, and even among attendees at the same daily outing.

“I don’t think it would be unfair to say that it’s really a sort of glorified babysitting,” said Sherman. “But it was also a wonderful means of community building that offer entertainment and camaraderie. It’s always seemed like a good way for them [teens] to make some money and promote community spirit at the same time. Its just really a shame it got shut down.”

The number of these so-called camps is difficult to define, based on their casual nature. But it seems their future, at least for this summer, is in doubt, as the town has been forced to figure out how to regulate an activity that seems to have always lived in a sort of regulatory gray area.

In what Sherman calls a “tit-for-tat” reaction, the owner of a home on Sea Barn Road at the center of last year’s ongoing debate over short-term rental of shorefront homes filed a sort of counter-claim, siccing the code enforcement officer on neighbors across the road who had been among the first to complain about revolving traffic loud parties and even bus trips to the property at the end of the short dead-end road.

“He [the code enforcement officer] came over and said, ‘We got a phone call. Do you have kids here,” recalled Patricia Grennon last week. Her son Christopher and a friend were then leading eight boys, ages 8-10, through kayak skills and other sports-themed activities for four hours each morning. So, Grennon said, yes, there were a fair number of children in her yard.

“Then he asked, ‘Do you have a permit for a day care?” said Grennon. “I said, ‘Oh, my gosh, I’m so sorry.’ It never would have occurred to me that this four days a week, for four hours a day, for two to four weeks in the summer, would be something that would need a business permit.”

Asked what she could do to rectify the situation, Bruce Smith, the code enforcement officer at the time, reportedly told the Grennons there was nothing to be done. The camp would have to cease operation. Luckily, that year’s iteration only had one day left, so Christopher Grennon called the parents of each of his charges and advised they could not return the following day.

“I don’t blame Bruce Smith,” said Sherman. “I think his hands were tied. There wasn’t really much he could do at that point.”

Smith left the town last fall after being placed on administrative leave for unrelated issues. At their meeting, Planning Board members asked if the new code enforcement officer, Benjamin McDougal, might see his way clear to letting the camps resume their flight path under the radar.

“I’m looking for the outrage,” said board Chairwoman Victoria Volent.

“When were here working on the short-term rental issue, it was all packed back here,” said Volent, waving to the empty audience chairs behind here in the Jordan Conference Room. “I’m feeling nothing on this. Does this almost seem like a home occupation? It just doesn’t seem to rise to the need for an ordinance or regulation.”

“Suppose the next one is a drum and bugle camp,” said board member Peter Curry. “It might be nice to hammer things down a little bit to keep the neighborhood happy.

“I don’t think so,” said Town Planner Maureen O’Meara, on whether McDougal might be inclined to look the other way. “He tends to be a by-the-book kind of guy.”

The problem, said O’Meara, is that the genie is out of the bottle, so to speak. Far from being able to exist because no local ordinance says they can’t, the camps need an ordinance to permit them. That’s partly because Cape allows for “home day care” of up to six children younger than age 16, or of two adults, with a permit from the code enforcement officer. Even then, any objection to such a use from any neighbor sends the facility to the Zoning Board of Appeals for a conditional use permit. A “day care facility” for up to three adults or seven children in a residence, or any number in a dedicated facility, requires more stringent site plan review from the Planning Board. Both types of day care must have a fenced-in play area as well as a dedicated vehicle pick-up and drop-off zone.

“We wouldn’t want an adult to try and run an actual day care as one of these camps,” said O’Meara. “With some kind of limitation, it removes any financial incentive to try that.”

However, Gennon said that while there was some income involved – her son bought a surfboard and set some money aside for college with what he made – the camps, either the one her son ran or the ones her younger daughter attended, were “not something anybody would do as a business long term.”

“I don’t see any overlap with day care,” she said. “It really was like babysitting, or a high school version of a lemonade stand. It was just kind of this wholesome, neat give-and-take among kids in the community with a little business experience thrown in. It was very casual.”

“For me, it was girls in my grade, kids from around town,” said Grennon’s daughter, Katheryn, now 14, who attended camps similar to the one he brother ran when she was younger.

“I liked it because it was a way to make connections with the older kids in the community,” she said, comparing the camps to Big Brother/Big Sister activities.

Although the Planning Board could not agree on the need to regulate the camps, it did ultimately take up O’Meara’s recommendation, that the easiest thing to do is to define the camps in the ordinances, and then allow them to exist with certain limitations. Among the limits agreed to by the board included allowing the camps only in weeks when school is not in session, with no more than 10 children attending for less than four hours per day, along with mandating some form of adult supervision.

O’Meara will draft a definition for the board to review at its May 7 meeting, to be followed by a public hearing and referral back to the Town Council. In the meantime, O’Meara has put out a call to anyone who has run a teen summer camp in Cape. Tradition aside, not a lot of information is available on the camps and how they were run by different groups of teens. O’Meara said she does not want to craft language for an ordinance that does more harm that good simply because so little has been documented about the camps, and few have thus far stepped forward to complain about no longer being able to conduct them.

Grennon says with her son off to college in the fall and unlikely to run another camp – the camps are generally something run by high school students – her family is not impacted by the timing of the solution. However, with the board unable to return to the issue until May due to subdivision ordinance work and other matters on its plate, there may not be time to craft a solution by summer.

“I don’t know if anyone will be able to do it this year,” Grennon said.