SOUTH PORTLAND – The aging Route 1 artery that runs through South Portland’s Thornton Heights neighborhood is scheduled to get a much-needed facelift following a three-year, multi-million dollar sewer project set to begin in March 2014.

In a workshop session last week, the City Council got a first peek at how the new streetscape may look, with wider sidewalks, esplanades and new street lights complementing bike lanes, on-street parking and, on the eastern end of the project, a landscaped median.

According to City Manager Jim Gailey, the intent is to replicate the success of last year’s Ocean Street rebuild in the downtown Knightville district, once again taking advantage of work below street level to refurbish the look and feel of what can be seen above ground. In the case of Main Street, he said, the idea is to turn back the clock to a time before the advent of the automobile economy, when Thornton Heights – or Skunk Hill, as it was then known – was a thriving, self-sufficient community.

Before World War II, Thornton Heights was a bustling village center largely made up of workers from the nearby Rigby Yard rail terminal and their families. Main Street at the time was a string of grocers, drug stores, churches and ice cream shops that sprang up to serve local residents, along with a few smaller factories and manufacturing concerns built to harness a handy, ready-made workforce.

But during the three decades between the end of the war and the opening of Interstate 295 in the 1970s, the economy of South Portland’s Main Street went from micro to macro, becoming less a place to be than a means to get to someplace else.

“When many of us were children, this was the busiest street in the state of Maine,” recalled Mayor Tom Blake.

As such, local stores gave way to a long line of hotels, restaurants and gas stations. That was fine for a time, the locals able to easily get what they needed at nearby strip malls – another automobile-based innovation – including the state’s first, the Mill Creek Shopping Center, which opened in 1955.

But after Interstate 295 opened, the traffic that once rolled up Route 1 and across the old Vaughn Bridge into Portland found other, more efficient ways to get from here to there, leaving Main Street to slowly decay – hotels as likely now to house transients as tourists and the main drag, over-engineered for its current use, acting like an asphalt scar across the landscape.

“The width of pavement that’s available isn’t really necessary for the traffic volume we see today,” said Dan Riley, a senior project manager with the city’s contracted engineering firm, Sebago Technics, when unveiling the project on Oct. 28.

“Route 1 was constructed before other highways when it was the main corridor north and south, but the traffic levels it was contemplated for don’t exist today, with all the traffic on the turnpike,” said Riley. “So, we came up with a concept that maintains the corridor for motor vehicles while achieving other objectives such as calming traffic though the area and providing for bike and pedestrian improvements.”

“We’re trying to take a 1960s street and blend it back into the community,” said Gailey. “A new modernized feel goes a long way. It brings a lot of pride back into an area. People then want to not only live in the area but to do business there. As in Knightville, we’re looking for a nice, commercial feel, so new development can come back in.”

“It’s what we can do to revitalize an area,” agreed Assistant City Manager Jon Jennings, hired as a specialist in economic development. “We’re not in a position to move business in here. We don’t make that decision. But we can make it an attractive place to be––make it more inviting, make it more walkable, make it more green. All we can do is put everything in place to make an area really grow.”

“This concept, with all departments working together off the sewer project, gives us a chance to address an area that has been quite neglected,” said City Planner Tex Hauser. “If you can get a little bit of a critical mass, maybe people don’t get in their cars and go to get stuff, they walk to the nearest neighborhood activity center.”

Project scope, costs

How much the reconstruction work will cost is unclear at this time. Neither Riley nor any city officials will give a ballpark estimate, saying Sebago Technics’ design specs are only 30 percent complete at this time.

However, the work is part of a 12-year project to divert storm water from running into the sewer system, which can cause backups in heavy rain events, forcing effluent to overflow into the Fore River and Casco Bay. In December of 2011, the city adopted a plan, said at the time to cost $15.6 million, to eliminate all but one combined sewer discharge point in South Portland, getting rid of the 43 catch basins. When complete, South Portland should be able to comply with its Maine Department of Environmental Protection permitting, allowing it to weather the kind of 24-hour rainstorm that has a 50 percent chance of happening in any year, without an overflow.

According to Gailey, the portion of the project completed in Knightville last fall after two years’ work, which resulted in a transformed streetscape there, cost $3.5 million.

The Knightville work encompassed an area of 15 acres and included the installation of about 5,000 linear feet of new storm drains. The Thornton Heights project, by contrast, will cover 74 acres in three years and see the installation of more than three miles’ worth of drain pipes.

The upcoming construction also includes work on 106 manholes and catch basins, eliminating three detention basins and separating stormwater runoff from 59 catch basins it now shares with the sewage system. Meanwhile, the city will replace or modify 44 additional sewer structures, lay more than 1.1 miles of new sewer mains, and rebuild 1.22 miles of sidewalk.

On Main Street, reconstruction will include 4,750 feet of sidewalk (0.9 miles) and 33 streetlights.

Another predictor of the Thornton Heights’ cost is concurrent work to be done near the Cape Elizabeth town line along Drew Road, where stormwater and sewage are collected in a combine sewer overflow, or CSO, at a Portland Water District pump station on Ottawa Road, from which it eventually flows to the city treatment plant.

A five-year project intended to reduce water flow by 1,100 gallons per minute during peak storm times has been pegged at $2.37 million, with initial design work from Portland-based Wright-Pierce expected to cost $170,000.

The Maine Department of Environmental Protection approved a master plan for the project in July, said Wright-Pierce project manager Chris Dwinal. It is hoped that Cape will share the cost of construction, he added, noting that South Portland’s share will be covered by revenue from its tax increment finance accounts, which defer some taxation on capital improvements made by businesses while dedicating some of the rest to specific projects.

According to Gailey, similar agreements with some of the city’s largest employers, including its two semiconductor plants, is expected to cover the lion’s share of the Thornton Heights work, along with state and federal grants.

A ‘complete street’

Even so, the facelift won’t be as comprehensive as some would like. At the Oct. 28 workshop, Kathy DiPhilippo, executive director of the South Portland Historical Society, asked that the power lines criss-crossing Main Street be buried out of sight.

“I think this project is a great opportunity to beautify that area,” she said. “But in order to really, really fix this, what we really should do is take those overhead utilities and put them underground. If you’re going to open up those streets and have a massive project out there, doing that could really, really make a difference.”

“Technically, it’s feasible,” said Riley. “But it would be really expensive.”

According to Riley, South Portland has some latitude in remaking Main Street through Thornton Heights, given that the neighborhood is in an urban compact area. However, the state will ultimately have to sign off on any changes, given Route 1’s designation as a “Priority 1 mobility corridor.”

“We’ve met with them, and we expect to hear back from them on how they want to be involved in the final design of this,” said Riley. “We’ve been told they’ll let us know as soon as they can give us some more guidance.”

The state does have time however. The first year of work, set to begin next March, will focus on sewer lines in the 30-acre area between Main Street and the Maine Central rail line. Phase 2 the following year will move across Main Street to rebuild sewer lines in the 18-acrea area surrounding Hertford Avenue and bordering the Memorial Middle School complex. The third year of the project will involve sewer work in the 26 acres between Main Street and the middle school borderlands rebuilt the previous year, as well as the Main Street makeover. New detention ponds will be built on Sunset Avenue and in a field near the middle school.

When Main Street is rebuilt, the current vision calls for the road to remain much as it is now, between Westbrook Street and Aspen Avenue, with two lanes of traffic in either direction. However, both sides of the road will be improved with a new 7-foot-wide sidewalk and a 4-foot-wide bike lane.

From Aspen Avenue to Southwell Avenue, the road will narrow to two 11-foot-wide travel lanes, one in either direction. The bike lanes will be expanded to 5 feet wide and a landscaped esplanade, complete with LED street lighting, will be added in between the bike lane and the sidewalk. In addition, on-street parking will be created with a 10-foot-wide strip on the eastern side of the road.

Finally, from Southwell Avenue to Mardale Avenue, traffic will split as the 10-foot parking lane disappears, replaced by a 10-foot-wide landscaped median.

The city’s work, involving all departments but led by the water resource group, will be combined with utility updates from Unitil and the Portland Water District to make sure construction crews only have to dig into the streets once.

Once Thornton Heights is rebuilt, CSO work will move on to Pleasantdale. Mayor Blake, who grew up in that part of the city and has walked it recently during his re-election campaign, said that project, in one of the poorest parts of South Portland, can’t come soon enough.

“We really need to spend some time there,” he said.

According to Brad Weeks, senior engineer for the water resource protection department, a neighborhood meeting will be scheduled sometime this winter so residents can get a closer look at the city’s Main Street plans.