The Damariscotta Planning Board accepted the site plan application of Stepping Stones Housing Inc. as complete on Monday, Aug. 8.

For the second meeting in a row, abutters and neighbors crowded the meeting room and shouted questions at the board and Town Planner Anthony Dater.  Several neighbors had petitioned the board to restrict the number of houses to five, rather than the seven the town’s code enforcement officer Stan Waltz said are grandfathered at the site.

There were seven housing units on the property, known locally as Blue Haven, including the original home of John Andrews, who built many of the cottages. His estate left the land and houses to Stepping Stones to continue to provide low-income housing.

The most vocal of the speakers was Jessica Sirois, who lives nearby. She questioned the difference in rules between a subdivision and an ordinary site plan review, whether the seven housing units qualified for grandfathered status, and whether improvements to the water and sewer system, done by Andrews years ago, rendered the grandfather clause inactive.

Waltz said a single water and sewer system did not violate the clause. It was his opinion that the clause applied to all seven residences, and the town attorney said she could find no case law either for five or seven residences, so the Planning Board would have to make the call.

Dater explained the minor differences between a subdivision and an ordinary site plan review and said that if the board chose to review the Stepping Stones site plan as a subdivision, the only real differences would be the need to include metes and bounds on the site plan map — something Bill Hain of Stepping Stones had already provided through a surveyor — and that the site plan would have to be filed in the County Registry of Deeds. A subdivision plan is not required for a leased multifamily property, but the board elected to go with a parallel path, including a subdivision plan and an ordinary site plan review.

The neighbors also objected to the age of the metes and bounds of the survey, which dated from 1995, but the board decided there was no reasonable chance that the metes and bounds had changed dramatically in the last 21 years.

Sirois asked repeated questions about filing an appeal, but Dater explained that until the board acted on the site plan review, Sirois lacked standing to file an appeal. Once the board made a decision, he told her, she could file an appeal within 30 days.

The board accepted the site plan review as complete, and agreed to make a decision on the grandfather clause at the next meeting, Tuesday, Sept. 6.