The nine-month conflict over a proposed beer garden on lower Main Street moved toward resolution Wednesday when the Planning Board approved the applicants’ sketch plan and waived the required off-street parking for restaurants, the last big hurdle for the applicants.
Roxanne Poulin and Sam Flinkstrom have been attempting for most of the past year to open a business they are calling Happy Valley Wine and Beer Garden, located at the former site of of Reo’s Barber Shop next to Driscoll Brook.
The standoff between the applicants and various town officials shifted the week of June 12 when the Zoning Board of Appeals agreed that town Code Enforcement Officer Jenifer McCabe had acted appropriately last August in issuing a stop work order on the project. During a meeting with two lawyers representing the town, the board said Poulin and Flinkstrom had wrongly insulated their property because they didn’t have an active building permit to do so.
While revocation of the building permit was deemed proper, the three-member appeals board also ruled that the permit should have been deferred, not denied, by the town, which meant the couple could reapply to the code enforcement office for a permit.
Work on the site has been in progress since January 2022, including removal of an old mobile home, grading and filling of the lot, addition of a retaining wall, and interior renovation of an existing building.
The proposed project is now on track for a public hearing and a final presentation to the Planning Board at 7 p.m. July 19. A morning site walk is scheduled for the same day.
Planning Board Chair Greg Zinser on Wednesday thanked the applicants for working through the many ordinance requirements Poulin and Flinkstrom had initially presented as 11 waiver requests, most of which the board previously denied.
Shoreland zoning, change of use from a barbershop to a 49-seat restaurant, and off-street parking were among the issues requiring more review, according to previous Planning Board minutes. The board has the authority to grant approval for projects, and is required to adhere to town code and ordinances as they make their decisions.
Town Council and Planning Board minutes and recordings from the last nine months reveal increasing frustration between the applicants and town staff, council and board, as both sides continued to hold their ground on their interpretation of the ordinances.
At the Zoning Board of Appeals meeting on June 12, Flinkstrom and Poulin read a letter asking the board to find that the town acted illegally when it denied them a building permit for insulating. They had a “vested interest” in their property, they said, because they had spent money based on misleading information from the code enforcement office in January 2022, a department then headed by Joseph Rousselle.
According to attorney Zachary B. Brandwein of Bernstein Shur in Portland, representing the code enforcement office, Poulin and Flinkstrom long ago missed the 30-day window to contest the withdrawal of their building permit. Any “vested interest” was not something the Zoning Board of Appeals has authority to consider, he said. The issue before the board was whether McCabe had acted correctly when she revoked the building permit and issued a stop work order, he added.
Those opinions were backed by the appeals board’s lawyer, James M. Katsiaficas of Perkins Thompson in Portland, who also attended the June 12 meeting.
Though the appeals board met to discuss the case on June 12, they did not issue a final decision until June 16, after Katsiaficas drew up the exact language for the vote. The three board members – John Klossner, Jeffrey Clark and Chair James Mundy –finalized the document later that day.
The town in May had filed a lawsuit against Poulin and Flinkstrom’s business entity, Caponera LLC, alleging it violated the stop work order at the property multiple times over a period of nine months. Asked last week whether the lawsuit is going forward, McCabe declined to comment. Contacted Thursday, Poulin said it is her understanding the lawsuit is still pending.
According to the town’s suit, the owners were issued an erroneous building permit on April 25, 2022, before they had approval from the Planning Board for a conditional use permit and a site plan. The stop work order was issued Aug. 10, 2022, to allow the business time to obtain those approvals from the Planning Board.
Late in September 2022, the business was told the building permit had been revoked and they would need to reapply to the code enforcement office for a new permit. The 30-day period to contest the withdrawal of their permit started at that point, according to the timeline cited by Brandwein, the town’s attorney.
With the board’s finding the formal application complete, Poulin and Flinkstrom can proceed with the Planning Board approval process.
