SCARBOROUGH – Almost two years after residents started to raise a stink, the town of Scarborough is poised to address traffic issues along Pine Point Road, where free roadside parking may soon become a thing of the past.

Problems there date to a controversial 2009 land swap, in which the Town Council decommissioned the end of Pine Point Road, known as Depot Street, and gave it to the owners of the Lighthouse Inn in return for part of an adjacent parking lot. Depot Street ran between the inn and the lot, and the exchange allowed the Truman family, owners of the inn, to convert the road into new parking spaces closer to their building. The town later renovated the old Truman lot to create Snowberry Ocean View Park.

The new park quickly became an attractive access point to the shore and many beachgoers have since favored taking advantage of free roadside parking on Pine Point Road over making the turn onto King Street at the inn and continuing on to the municipal lot at Hurd Park, on Avenue Five, where the daily parking fee ranges from $5 to $10, depending on the time of day.

According to locals who have written the town to complain about cars clogging the main artery, vehicles have been known to line both sides of Pine Point Road from the inn, past the old Snow’s canning plant, as far back as the Route 9 bridge over the Pan-Am rail line.

In 2012, Police Chief Robert Moulton had an informal, in-house study done and, concluding the residents were not exaggerating, ordered the placement of temporary “No Parking” signs near the old cannery as a temporary respite.

“In some ways, we have become the victim of our own success,” said Town Manager Tom Hall.

Alleviating the congestion will require an amendment to the town’s traffic ordinance and the Town Council’s three-member ordinance committee is slated to address the issue at its next meeting, scheduled for 1 p.m. on Wednesday, Feb. 5.

It’s not the first time the committee has eyeballed the issue. It was initially intended to follow up Moulton’s action at a September 2012 meeting. However, “for whatever reason,” Hall said, the topic fell off the radar. It was raised again as a future agenda item in early 2013, just before all attention in town shifted to matters of dogs and plovers.

Although the issue of roadside parking on Pine Point Road has been on the ordinance committee’s back burner for some time, Hall said last week it was uncertain what solution the committee might devise, although some limitation on the current free-for-all is expected.

“I don’t expect it will be terribly controversial,” he said. “Most of the comments we’ve got have been from the residents down there, who say it’s a problem.

“The fix could be fairly simple,” added Hall. “The police department has observed this and has some opinions about it. I think it certainly is high time to be talking about it.”

But more than a mere parking limit may be in the offing. It’s possible Pine Point Road could soon see meters springing up on both sides of the street. Margot Hodgkins raised that possibility at the Jan. 9 meeting of the town’s ad hoc Animal Control Advisory Committee, as it was contemplating how to pay for enforcement of rules designed to protect the endangered piping plover.

“One money maker we could use is the parking on Pine Point Road,” she said. “We are losing thousands of dollars in parking fees. In the summertime, the parking lot is not full but Pine Point Road is booked on both sides. People have found out they don’t need to get a pass, they can just park on the road in what was [once] designated as a bike lane but no longer is, because it’s all parked.”