Due to poor road conditions, the town of Cumberland has threatened to withdraw emergency response to Lakeside Drive area in East Windham.

Facing a potential discontinuation of emergency services, the Windham Town Council passed an emergency moratorium on development in East Windham’s Forest Lake neighborhood Tuesday night.

The area, once composed of several camps on the gravelly Lakeside Drive, has steadily grown in the past decade, as developers have built up the housing stock by constructing three paved narrow, private roads that branch off Lakeside Drive – James Way, Bruschi Road and Atlantic Drive.

For decades, Windham has paid the town of Cumberland a fee to provide first-response emergency services to the neighborhood, since the West Cumberland Fire Station is only about a mile away, while the North Windham Fire Station is about 8 miles away. The annual fee is approximately $3,000. But Cumberland officials have grown increasingly frustrated with the neighborhood’s narrow, undulating roads, which they say are causing problems as increasing development has led to more traffic and more road deterioration.

Five years ago, Cumberland hired two large tow trucks to remove a fire truck from the neighborhood, after the fire truck’s bumper and fender were damaged due to icy conditions. Three years ago, Cumberland asked Windham to fix the roads, three of which do not meet the town’s private road development standards, since they were built before the standards were approved five years ago. For the last two years, Cumberland emergency responders have stopped servicing the area during the winter and mud season, according to Cumberland Town Councilor Mike Edes, and Windham first responders located much farther away have taken up winter service in the Forest Lake neighborhood.

“We have stopped providing emergency services from around the 1st of December to sometime in April because the roads are so bad due to icing, due to snow banks, due to turnarounds not being plowed,” Edes said. “We’ve let Windham know without any question that we are no longer going to be able to provide emergency services if the situation continues. Windham is taking the steps right now necessary, but the question is, what are we going to do.”

Windham councilors voted 5-0 Tuesday night to approve a 180-day development moratorium in order to give the town time “to identify and analyze these issues and then to develop and implement any necessary amendment(s) to the Land Use and other use ordinances and regulations to address these development pressures,” according to the moratorium ordinance. Councilor Donna Chapman did not attend the Tuesday meeting.

According to Town Manager Tony Plante, the intent of the moratorium is to put the brakes on development of new homes and private roads and give the town and neighbors time to fix the substandard roads. The moratorium is needed, Plante said, because state law allows large landowners to circumvent subdivision review standards and build homes and private roads without Planning Board review – a “loophole,” Plante said, that has been regularly used in Windham and in the Forest Lake neighborhood.

“There’s a loophole that allows you to break off lots if you have a large tract of land,” Plante said. “State law allows you to break off no more than two lots every five years and if you’re smart or you know how to do it, you can break that up. And over a period of five, 10, 15 years you’ve got what amounts to a neighborhood that has never gone through Planning Board review.”

In an attempt to control the process, Plante said, the town imposed private road development standards half a decade ago. But the three private roads in the Forest Lake neighborhood were built before the standards were imposed and are grandfathered.

Since the council approved the moratorium on an emergency basis, it is required to hold a public hearing and a re-authorization within 60 days. An emergency moratorium does not require an initial public hearing before it is authorized. The 180-day moratorium can be renewed twice.

Council Chairman David Nadeau said he favored an emergency moratorium, as opposed to a conventional one, because the matter is an issue of public safety. Nadeau hopes the measure will spur Forest Lake residents to consolidate their two road associations and investigate how to improve the roads.

“The only reason I’m in favor of declaring an emergency moratorium now is so Forest Lake has a chance to come together and put an association together – they’ve got two, but combine them and include some of the other ones – and then have them move forward and look at the emergency issue for emergency responding vehicles in the mud season and in the winter,” Nadeau said. “If they can get it done within 180 days, that 180 days should give them time to bring everybody together and fix the issue on that road.”

At the Tuesday meeting, several residents of the Forest Lake neighborhood spoke in favor of the moratorium. Michael Manning, a resident of Bruschi Road, warned that another five or six homes would be built in the next few years if the moratorium were not imposed.

“I have a small child, I have a home, I have a brother-in-law who’s a firefighter and if he doesn’t feel comfortable coming down in a fire truck to save his own nephew, then I wonder what other firefighters who don’t have a personal call will feel on a winter day when they have a family to go home to,” Manning said.

According to Edes, the Cumberland Town Council is even considering the option of completely discontinuing emergency services to the neighborhood.

“The Town Council in the very near future will be reviewing what level of service we want to provide, if any, and all things are on the table,” Edes said. “We have some councilors that want to continue service the way it is, we have others that want to discontinue all service.”

Michael Devoid, a resident of Atlantic Drive, urges the Windham Town Council to adopt a moratorium on development in the Forest Lake neighborhood in East Windham. Increased development is causing road safety problems for Cumberland emergency responders who have serviced the neighborhood for decades.Staff photo by Ezra Silk