“You cannot make sweet wine out of sour grapes.” Thomas Fuller, British physician and scholar.

This is a column I didn’t expect to write but I guess one should take the opportunity if it is given to them.

Lately the discussions on private roads in Windham have become far less than private and I am not surprised at all. It is something that has been brewing and stewing in Windham for some time so when one group or another lit the fuse on that power keg, the explosion was going to happen one way or another. It will be interesting how this works out in the future because the problem comes from Windham’s past. I fully suspect that smalltown politics resulted in what problems Windham has to deal with today.

How private roads became a problem in Windham today is a very perplexing problem to me. My wife and I lived on a private road in Lincoln and I find it amazing to see all the problems Windham has with its private roads and yet I never heard of one in Lincoln.

Don’t get me wrong, there very well could have been but I wasn’t as politically connected as I am now. Yes, there was building going on along newly constructed roads that were not paved and yet those gravel roads were in better shape than some paved ones in Windham.

We left Lincoln and moved to the town of Lee just 13 miles away. Lee was a small town of 738 people while covering almost 39 square miles. As one could guess, there were miles and miles of unpaved roads maintained by Lee’s road commissioner which at the time was a one-man operation. What’s even more amazing is the town had a fully operational transfer station where a resident could get rid of practically everything except junk cars.

I am not taking sides on anything to do with private roads in Windham because the problems seem to originate from several causes depending on who someone talks with. Some say that state laws allow for subdividing land every so many years and there is nothing Windham can do about it. Some will say that developers took shortcuts in order to save money and really didn’t care about the condition of a road when the project was done. Some appear to not want further development once they have purchased a home on a private road. Some complain that for some reason or other a road association was never formed or some refused to pay into it. I believe that private roads each have their own problems and I wonder how far the town of Windham can go to solve problems.

All one has to do is look at what’s happening with the private roads around Windham’s Forest Lake area. It is sad that area has no road or roads connected directly to Windham, and that’s a problem all by itself.

Parts of Gray on Little Sebago Lake are serviced by the town of Raymond so now a group wants that section of Gray to become part of Raymond, which will be a long, hard fight to accomplish. I don’t know if the best answer would be for the Forest Lake area of Windham to become part of either Cumberland or Gray. I am sure town officials in Windham won’t want to give up the property taxes obtained from the area.

It has been stated many times that the squeaky wheel gets the grease. Maybe the Windham town councilors jumped the gun when they sought to fix the road problems around Forest Lake. Maybe the solution is to look at all the private roads in Windham. Maybe it’s best to let private road associations fix their own problems. I looked at some homes that were part of an association in another town and quickly decided it wasn’t for me.

Maybe the problem is how money is spent by the town of Windham. Last Tuesday the town councilors probably spent nearly $500,000 on new equipment and $100,000 on wastewater planning and engineering services.

Lane Hiltunen of Windham now knows which roads are paved with good intentions.