Gorham Town Manager David Cole, retiring Friday, pauses to reflect last week after receiving applause from town councilors at the end of his final Town Council meeting. Cole, 65, was appointed 23 years ago.

Gorham Town Manager David Cole, retiring Friday, pauses to reflect last week after receiving applause from town councilors at the end of his final Town Council meeting. Cole, 65, was appointed 23 years ago.

GORHAM — For a few quiet moments last week, David Cole remained seated after town councilors ended their meeting applauding him for his work after nearly a quarter century as town manager.

It was his final Town Council meeting.

Cole retires at 3 p.m. Friday, marking a tenure filled with a population and housing explosion, a bypass dream fulfilled and nature repeatedly inflicting damage to the town. He will be succeeded by Ephrem Paraschak, the former Naples town manager.

Cole was hired in 1994 and retires in the 24th year of leading the town through some trying times and events.

“It’s flown by,” Cole said.

In his office Monday at the municipal center, Cole recalled some of the highlights through the years.

The town has experienced rapid growth from a population of 14,141 in 2000 to well over 17,000 now. In 2010 the town overtook Waterville as the 15th largest municipality in the state, he said.

That growth led to major upgrades of town facilities. He recalled the library expansion, new Public Works facility, converting an archaic junior high school into a modern community center, construction of two schools, a renovated Central Fire Station, and new Police Department headquarters.

Multiple road and highway improvements and repairs have been completed. The town was in the path of several severe storms that tore up infrastructure. He remembered a tornado and two microbursts that flattened barns ripped out trees,  blocked roads and knocked out power.

But, he said disasters brought out the best in the town’s citizens.

In one of the storms, he said, a downed tree had rush hour traffic stalled on a major road. But a guy with a chainsaw in his vehicle was already at work when Cole arrived at the scene.

“Where else but in Maine,” Cole said, would someone have a chainsaw at the ready.

Then there was the ice storm of 1998 and homes went without electricity for days because of downed trees and power lines. “Our crews were working with Central Maine Power,” Cole said.

Flooding in a storm in the 1990s caused substantial damage. Cole said Gorham received 18.65 inches of rain in a 24-hour period. “It was a 300-year storm,” he said. “We had just about every road in town sustaining damage.”

It took a year to finish repairs.

In the aftermath of the storms, the town has upgraded its roads and storm systems in preparation for future weather events.

He has been to countless meetings over the years and he couldn’t begin to guess the number. “If you’re a town manager, you are a professional meeting attendee,” he said.

Meetings with Maine’s Congressional delegation in Washington, D.C., played a key role in the Bernard P. Rines Bypass becoming a reality after 16 studies and 55 years of effort. Accompanied by town councilors and businessmen Burleigh Loveitt and Michael Phinney, Cole traveled to the nation’s capital to lobby for the bypass. The highway that today sends gasoline/oil tankers and commuters out around the village opened in 2008.

The next piece is linking the bypass with the turnpike, he said. A major hurdle for that project was cleared this year when the Legislature authorized the Maine Turnpike Authority to construct a connector.

Cole predicts a new connector study could begin within one to three years, and that’s an important step for the southern Maine economy, he said.

Asked about retirement, Cole said Monday won’t seem all that different since it’s a holiday.

“The problem is Tuesday, it’s going to be awful,” Cole said.

“On Wednesday, it’ll be OK,” he said he told his wife, Kathy.

Robert Lowell can be reached at 854-2577 or rlowell@keepmecurrent.com.