Damariscotta voters met for a public hearing and special town meeting on Feb. 17 to decide whether or not to approve matching funds for a possible Community Development Block Grant to address drainage and sidewalk problems on Elm and Theater streets.

The grant application was not approved in 2015, but the town was urged to reapply this year. The grant is expected to be awarded in July, if the town receives it this year, with construction beginning in October. Drainage work would be done initially. Curbs would be raised, owing to the gradual rising of the streets over the years as repaving work has been done, and the sidewalks would be resurfaced. Final touches, including landscaping, would be done in the spring. 

The total cost for the project would be nearly $400,000, but the town’s matching portion would be about $95,000, with $30,000 of that coming from the Richard Else bequest. Else left $200,000 to Damariscotta in his will, and the town has been able to leverage those funds for projects like the Elm and Theater streets infrastructure project in the past by applying for state and federal dollars for needed improvement projects.

“By using the bequest in this way, Damariscotta has been able to get a lot done for the town,” Town Manager Matt Lutkus said; $65,000 would have to be moved from the town’s reserves to the capital improvement fund, but Lutkus said the funds remaining in the reserves meet the auditors’ requirements for emergency funding.

After a brief public hearing, during which nearly all the voters expressed approval for the plan, the hearing ended and the special town meeting convened to approve the plan in general and the use of $65,000 from reserves for the town’s match. Both questions passed unanimously.

Earlier, the Board of Selectmen met with members of the Twin Villages Downtown Alliance. The Alliance recommended face-to-face meetings between the select board and the downtown businesses to get the businesses on board with the proposed waterfront plan, and hopefully to bring in more assistance from other towns on the peninsula. “Let’s face it,” Selectman James Cosgrove said. “Damariscotta is the ‘downtown’ for 7,000 people on the peninsula. How do we bring them into the project?”

The short answer, said Mary Kate Reny, a member of the Alliance, is that the town cannot expect the outlying communities to pay for downtown improvements, unless there is some sort of fee-for-parking scheme. She recommended starting the process for a Business Improvement District (BID). Businesses would be taxed a small amount, but would likely pass that tax cost on to customers and tenants. The funds could be used for maintenance in the business downtown area, including the waterfront project.

“Some of the businesses won’t like it,” she said. “But the project will make their assets better, improve flood control, maybe save money on flood insurance, and it will benefit everyone downtown in the long run.” She also pointed out that where BIDs exist, there is money to deal with day to day issues, such as graffiti removal.

The Alliance and the Board of Selectmen also considered the idea of tax increment financing if a project came to Damariscotta that could be assessed in such a way.

After the special town meeting, the Board of Selectmen held their regularly scheduled meeting.  A new date for the workshop on the Planning Board’s sign ordinance was scheduled, on Feb. 29 at 6 p.m. The contract for Topsham engineering company Wright Pierce was approved for general engineering services and the shellfish warden’s contract with the Lincoln County Sheriff’s Office was approved for $5,000 for training and time.