Weather permitting, Wiscasset’s Ordinance Review Committee will be downtown Monday night, March 29 walking the sidewalks and measuring them. The panel is working on a policy for selectmen to consider adopting on the sidewalks’ use.

For lack of a quorum, the ORC’s Monday, March 22 Zoom meeting became a workshop. Members mulled the need to keep a clear, mostly straight path past merchants’ displays. People should be able to walk along as quickly as if the displays were not there, Chair Karl Olson said. “It can’t be an arduous journey of zigzagging.”

The path must connect to the handicap ramps, he added.

The panel also discussed how merchants might share space with Wiscasset Art Walk and other events. “It may be that we’re going to have to juxtapose some of these merchants’ displays with, ‘Oh, the dance troupe has to go this way, not that way,’” Lincoln County Regional Planning Commission Executive Director Mary Ellen Barnes said.

Olson said the events add to foot traffic, so he doubted businesses would balk at temporarily sharing space with them.

The panel was not putting COVID-19 restrictions into the rules; any Center for Disease Control guidelines would still apply, Barnes said. And those will go away, Olson said. “Hopefully, COVID is not the new standard for our lives, just that it feels that way.”

Monday’s downtown walk starts at Sarah’s Cafe, 45 Water St. at 5:15 p.m.

The ORC plans a workshop for public input on a possible marijuana ordinance. No date was set.