After agreeing to grant a waiver for a road it had previously questioned, the Planning Board last week unanimously approved the sketch plan for a nine-lot subdivision on Belle Marsh Road.
The proposed 62-acre Hooper’s Landing development in the rural R5 zoning district would required a waiver for road access, including two dead end cul-de-sacs, that the board had been reluctant to grant.
The board took almost two hours at the Nov. 4 meeting to nail down an acceptable concept for Brown Coastal Development, based in Kittery Point.
The lengthy discussion between the board and the developer’s representatives, Michael Sudak of Altus Engineering out of Portsmouth, N.H., and attorney Michael Skolnick of Archipelago in Portland, primarily focused on the development’s impact on the environmentally sensitive land at 141 Belle Marsh Road.
The property includes 22 acres in Resource Protection areas of Hooper’s Swamp and two vernal pools that abutter Stephanie Ruger said at the meeting host threatened turtles and woodland amphibians.
The board eventually agreed that the proposed nine-lot cluster subdivision with two dead end roads – a cul-de-sac and a hammerhead – had the least impact of several other options that complied with the ordinance, even though the cluster plan required a waiver from existing road-length ordinance standards.
Sudak in August had presented a conventional subdivision plan with 11 house lots, 2.75 acres each, as well as cluster plans with smaller lots and 49 acres of open space set aside as permanently undeveloped.
Attorneys for the Town and the developer interpreted several of the town’s road-length ordinances differently, creating an impasse at the Oct. 7 meeting.
All the layouts required road-length waivers, a practice the Planning Board has considered eliminating from the ordinances because lengthy dead end roads create safety issues for police and fire protection, according to board members.
Skolnick on Nov. 4 asked the board for a decision, saying Brown Coastal could offer no more information, while Sudak pointed out the project had been stalled at the first stage of the permitting process for a long time.
“Can you make those determinations as a board tonight so we will know what we need to come back with?” Skolnick asked.
The board voted 5-0 to approve the sketch plan, and acknowledged waivers likely would need to be granted for road length, and possibly street standards, for the project to proceed further.
Several threatened and endangered species, including black racer snakes, swamp darters and Blanding’s and spotted turtles, live in the area, according to Maine Inland Fisheries and Wildlife, and both the Great Works Regional Land Trust and the State of Maine have preserved close to 485 acres that abut the parcel, according to GIS maps.
More than a third of acreage in South Berwick’s R5 zone, which includes six square miles of land east of Emery’s Bridge and Belle Marsh roads to the town lines of York and Wells, is under conservation protection.
