During intense storms and king tides, a street linking Scarborough and Cape Elizabeth through a marsh floods and becomes impassable.

Last year, the towns of Cape Elizabeth and Scarborough agreed to abandon the quarter-mile portion of Sawyer Street (known as Sawyer Road in Cape Elizabeth) that crosses the Spurwink Marsh, with the intention of creating turnarounds on both sides and restoring the marsh divided by the road.

But the removal of the road is not a done deal.

There has been no formal vote on the removal, according to Cape Elizabeth Town Council Chair Penny Jordan. Cape’s council has voted to apply for and accept the $1.6 million Maine Natural Resources Conservation Program grant. $90,000 of the funding has already been rolled out. Under state statute, both towns must adopt an order of discontinuance for the road before it can be removed.

If the orders are approved, both towns must schedule public hearings for the following month. After the hearings, the councils would have to wait 10 days before voting to discontinue the road. Cape Elizabeth’s order of discontinuance will be heard on Wednesday, Oct. 15. Scarborough will likely follow a similar timeframe.

 Prior to that, the Cape Elizabeth Town Council will have a workshop on Wednesday, Oct. 8, providing councilors with the opportunity to ask questions about the project.

“Neither community can go forward with this project without the other,” Scarborough Town Manager Tom Hall said.

If either town fails to approve the road discontinuance, Cape Elizabeth would have to return the grant funding. Hall said that the towns would likely be forced to fall back to the conventional approach — rebuilding the road and sizing up the culvert to ease flooding issues, which would require more collaboration between the towns to figure out how to split the costs.

Three years ago, both town councils agreed that adapting the road or replacing the culvert would be too expensive. A new culvert would cost between $2.5 million and $5 million — and the road could still flood after the work is done. Building a bridge to cross this portion of the marsh would cost more than $10 million.

“Is this a good investment?” Cape Elizabeth Town Planner Maureen O’Meara said at a recent stakeholder meeting. “Will taxpayers question spending this much? If you had $10 million to spend on road infrastructure, is this where you’d spend it?”

In a joint council meeting in 2022, the idea of abandoning the road was first mentioned. The proposed removal would add three minutes to commutes, according to O’Meara.

Last year, both town councils agreed to retreat from Sawyer Road/Street and share the cost of the project in what Hall described as “unprecedented level of intermunicipal collaboration.”

Each town agreed to pay $185,000 toward constructing turnaround infrastructure on their respective sides of the road. The conceptual plans for the Cape Elizabeth side involves three parking spaces, an overlook and a turnaround. The Scarborough side would feature a turnaround.

Hall doesn’t anticipate cost overruns, but should they occur, he said he would work with Cape Elizabeth Town Manager Pat Fox to update the plan to share costs proportionately between the two towns.

“At the end of the day, we have a failing piece of infrastructure,” Hall said. “I can’t think of too many opportunities when the low-cost, no-cost option is the best solution.”

Town leadership in both Scarborough and Cape Elizabeth have been concerned about the vulnerability of Sawyer Road/Street for nearly a decade.

“Sawyer Road was in the red on every single thing we were looking at,” O’Meara said. “It is a vulnerable road now. It was a vulnerable road in 2015.”

By 2050, the average highest tide is expected to be 6.1 feet, the approximate elevation of the low point of Sawyer Road/Street, according to the Scarborough Vulnerability Assessment.

Elizabeth Hayes, who lives on Sawyer Road on the Cape Elizabeth side, said that she’s noticed dangerous road conditions. During the four years she’s lived at her house, she remembers two storms that made it “look like the Mississippi River was flowing across that whole embankment and road.”

She’s called the police more than five times because she was concerned about people driving through flooding.

“This is not a once-in-a-lifetime event,” she said.

And the road is bad for the health of the marsh, according to Jacob Aman, the stewardship manager for the Wells National Estuarine Research Reserve.

Unrestricted sediment deposition within a marsh typically keeps pace with sea level rise, but in this case, the roadway restricts that process, causing pooling and the eventual creation of mud flats. There are “megapools” next to Sawyer Road/Street, and the velocity with which the water passes through the culvert is high enough for regular erosion.

“While it’s a great place to watch birds, it’s not a healthy salt marsh,” Aman said.

By restricting the flow of tidal water and freshwater, the road also impacts salinity levels. Many salt marsh species are sensitive to salinity levels in the soil and the amount of flooding, and their habitats are damaged by the inconsistency. Declining salinity levels could deteriorate peat in the marsh, releasing stored carbon back into the atmosphere, according to Aman.

The approved draft work plan indicates that the project would be executed in two phases, with a year devoted to environmental enhancement in the area adjacent to the roadway. The road would be removed in the second year. Per the terms of the grant, environmental professionals will be monitoring criteria like water level, vegetation and slopes through 2034. The baseline levels were collected this year.

The road sees 1,110 vehicles daily on average, according to Maine Department of Transportation data from 2022, the latest data available.

Not everyone is on board with the idea of road removal.

Ed MacColl, a resident of Wells Road in Cape Elizabeth, first heard about the project in spring of 2024. He sent multiple letters and sat down with leaders of both towns, urging them to keep the road.

“What’s the evidence that the road is damaging the marsh?” he asked. The marsh looks healthy to him, and he said the road floods the same way it has for 20 years.

“It was designed to flood,” he said. “There’s never been a time that that road didn’t flood.” He said that floodways are an effective and cost-efficient way to manage tidal flows. He thinks it’s all been overblown.

And he said the concerns presented by town staff could be addressed without removing the road. The towns could build flashing signs to warn people to turn around when the road is flooded, he said.

MacColl has taken issue with the process. He said there haven’t been public hearings on the issue, and the agreement to close the road should have been subject to the outcome of the statutory process, not predating it.

“It’s like a jury signing a contract before hearing evidence,” he said. There’s a lot of information that he still doesn’t know, like how much the project is going to cost the towns.

O’Meara said that this multi-year process has involved many presentations and conversations before council, environmental assessments and efforts to seek funding sources to lessen the burden on Cape taxpayers.