Scarborough Town Hall Staff Writer Kelley Bouchard

The Scarborough Town Council is planning changes to the town’s growth management ordinance (GMO). Proposals include dividing the town into three areas, each with it’s own growth limit and using a three-year rather and a one-year period to allot the number of allowable permits.

In September, Councilors Jon Anderson and Nicholas McGee were tasked to develop a recommendation plan for GMO revisions.

The goal is for the revision plan to be finished by April 5. The council held a workshop to discuss the revision on Feb. 15, where Anderson and McGee revealed their conceptual recommended plan. The plan shown was conceptual and not the final recommendation, with this workshop held for feedback and discussion.

Anderson and McGee consulted with the public, developers, and many town services and committees.

Several major problems with the existing GMO were identified including concern that the growth rate in Scarborough has been too fast, that there is too much uncertainty on the town’s exemption process, and a lack of predictability in the development process.

Based on feedback and discussions, Anderson and McGee created several key principles and objectives to apply to the GMO revision recommendation. These principles include slowing the pace of growth, protecting rural areas, conserving green space, addressing traffic concerns, providing more clarity and flexibility to developers, and a plan for public service infrastructure to be able to absorb new growth.

The current GMO allows an annual allocation of residential permits every year, dictating the number of buildings constructed. This number is reevaluated every two years. The existing GMO also allows an exemption process.

The permit numbers have increased to historic levels — from 61 permits in 2010—to over 200 and 300 in recent years.

An important fact to note is that the GMO is not the only municipal factor affecting growth. Impact fees, zoning issues, and other factors also affect growth, which the town also intends to work on.

The new GMO proposal would involve looking at the town in three areas, each with their own growth limit over a three-year period. Area One is rural and SF, with Running Hill, with 25 permits per year. Area Two is growth areas, with 300 every three years in growth areas. Area Three is the Crossroads Planned Development Area, which maintains current GMO and allows 450 permits every three years until built out.

“We’re saying our approach is we’re going to have a cap, that is our cap that we’ll work within,” said Anderson. “Market forces can work within that cap, some years it may be down 30%, other years it may be up 70%, so that’s why we wanted to go with a three-year span that allows for market variability. But we still wanted to cap it and say just because the market over that three-year period maybe is a good three years for development, we aren’t ready as a community to go beyond that, and so we want to cap it at those numbers that we proposed for every three years. So that is the challenge that we’re trying to blend in here. The market in some ways will dictate development, but it’s our job to ensure that despite what’s happening in the market, we are maximizing the general welfare for the general public. So that’s what we’re trying to do by setting a cap and saying that depending on whatever happens in the market cycle, as long as we stay under a certain threshold, we think that’s growth that the town can accommodate.”

In discussion, Councilor Karin Shupe expressed her concerns about the town’s growth. “I do have concerns and I will consistently say that I do not feel like the town is keeping up with the current rate of growth, I do not feel like we have been, and that’s why I’m sitting here today,” Shupe said. “Because for years I have been saying that my needs aren’t being met. For example, I have a daughter who is a teenager, I can’t get her into the teen program, so now my teenager is sitting at home. My son plays basketball, some of the basketball teams are now practicing in cafeterias. We are not keeping up with growth. We have a sixth grade that is in a building that provides zero special education services, directly impacting me and that impacts every single child who is special-ed that goes to our school system. I think we need to keep up with the pace.”

Anderson pointed out that it is difficult to keep up with the staffing to support growth, as the people for those jobs require affordable housing to live in Scarborough, making it part of a larger issue.

Councilor John Cloutier also had concerns. “I like the concept, I like the spreading it over three years, but what my gut tells me is going to happen without additional constraints is that you’re going to have enterprise come in and steal 300 permits, and no one is going to be able to build,” he explained. “… There’s going to need to be some safeguards in place to help guard against that happening.”

Cloutier also said that he thought the plan was good for conservation goals, but not for goals pertaining to affordable and workforce housing. He was otherwise onboard with the concept.

“I think having some predictability for developers is an overarching goal of mine because we didn’t want developers to have to come to us repeatedly with requests,” Councilor April Sither said. “So certainly predictability for developers is a goal of mine, but also accountability for us as a body is important to me too. I don’t want to have something we can just repeatedly roll over because that doesn’t give the community the predictability that they’re looking for.”

Councilor Don Hamill liked the concept, though he raised the question of when growth in Scarborough will be complete and they run out of room for further development.

The question of whether to have an exemption process was also discussed. “I would put it at almost a 50/50 split from the survey results we got back,” said McGee. “People saying we probably should have a process, others saying we don’t, it was almost right down the middle, so it was a coin flip.”

Anderson expressed desire for the council to move away from the idea of “public good” in determining exemptions as that is a very subjective qualifier. The focus instead, Anderson said, should be more analytic and based on whether the community could absorb whatever project is up for debate.

Most of the councilors felt that the amount of permits allowed in the new GMO proposal were still too high. Sither expressed concern about the impact of bigger projects that would take many of those permits.  Planning Director Autumn Speer suggested there could be a special exemption process for such larger projects, as an answer to those concerns.

“There’s no perfect solution, nor will this body create one, nor will the next one create one,” Anderson said. “ I think it’s really important that we find a path that we think is checking as many boxes as we can. And at least for the body that is here, try to stick to it, and try and be consistent, I think the hope is that we create a GMO that there’s enough rationale and justification behind it that the council can let it ride for three years, come back and review it … And this at least gives us some levers to play around with to say where do we want to target that pullback? Is it in area two, area three, area one … just to try and give us some choices or give the council choices of options of where we can pull back.”