Come together | Gateway 1 aims to bring collaboration to Route One planning in the midcoast
Every night, Jennifer Merritt's home shakes as trucks rumble down the section of U.S. Route One in front of her Waldoboro home. And during the day, Merritt can sometimes sit for several minutes waiting for a break in the traffic before she can pull out of her driveway. "I can see traffic all the way down the hill from the light at Moody's," she says, referring to the popular diner on Route One in Waldoboro.
Heavy traffic and 18-wheelers may not be a homeowner's best friend, but Merritt, as president of the Waldoboro Business Association, finds herself walking a fine line between representing the interests of Waldoboro residents like herself and the business owners relying on that traffic. "It's always a challenge to balance self-interest with the interest of a community," she says.
It's a balance Merritt needs to maintain as a member of the Gateway 1 steering committee, a group of representatives from 21 communities working with the Maine Department of Transportation to develop a long-range comprehensive plan for the 110-mile stretch of Route One between Brunswick and Verona.
For such an important road, Route One has developed over the years — through a hodgepodge of often-disparate local and state initiatives — into a road with an identity crisis. Zooming into Bath, Route One is an elevated highway that whisks people through town and over the Kennebec River. But just a few miles north, the road slows to a crawl through Wiscasset's historic downtown Main Street. As one drives deeper into midcoast Maine, the road morphs from bucolic country lane to strip mall to quaint main street and back again.
But, for its purposes, the Maine DOT views Route One as one thing: a road that should transport goods and people quickly, safely and efficiently. In the past, there have been clashing visions for the road. The state is responsible for regional transportation infrastructure decisions, but municipalities are responsible for making decisions that affect their individual stretches of road. The intersection of those often competing viewpoints has left its mark on Route One, where disjointed planning efforts have been marked by a lack of collaboration, wasted funds and results that oftentimes had unintended consequences, such as increased congestion and loss of scenery.
There had to be a better way, figured Kathy Fuller, the director of the Maine DOT's environmental office and the DOT's point person on the Gateway 1 project. "For years until the last decade, the department has been viewing Route One in the midcoast as that high-speed arterial connector," Fuller says. "But this highway serves numerous other functions and we can't close our eyes to that."
In May, the Gateway 1 steering committee, Maine DOT officials and a team of traffic and planning consultants led by the Portland office of Kansas City-based HNTB Corp. launched the first big marketing blitz to spread the word about the comprehensive planning. Their first project: a road show traveling up and down the coast to give presentations at council meetings and set up a traveling kiosk of information.
No one has attempted a regional planning effort for such a large transportation corridor before, says Evan Richert, a professor at the University of Southern Maine's Muskie School of Public Service and a member of the Gateway 1 consultant team, so there is no blueprint to use during the process. Because of this, Richert says that Gateway 1 is fraught with uncertainty. "There are times when we feel we are feeling our way in the dark," he says.
Indeed, getting the state, municipal officials and residents from 21 communities — as well as the Federal Highway Administration, which is funding the majority of the project — to agree on a vision for Route One will be a challenge, but one that needs to succeed, says Carol Morris, a consultant who's in charge of public outreach for the Gateway 1 project. "It's all one big balancing act," Morris says. "If Route One is allowed to be turned into a strip mall, like some places in southern Maine, it's not going to be an attractive tourist destination. You don't want to kill the goose that laid the golden egg."
What's the scenario?
Fuller, along with a group of midcoast residents who had been involved in an earlier, but failed, attempt at regional planning, hatched the plan for the Gateway 1 initiative in early 2004. After receiving the go-ahead from Maine DOT Commissioner David Cole, Fuller sought funding for the project from the Federal Highway Administration.
The past three years have been used to gather data about the region and Route One, assess local attitudes toward the road, and make sure the communities were on board with the project. By June 2005, the 21 communities had signed a memorandum of understanding and agreed to participate in this regional land-use and transportation-planning project.
In 2005, Gateway 1 received $350,000, 80% of which came from federal coffers, Fuller says. In 2006, the funding was roughly $1.3 million for the year, and Fuller says she needs roughly $1 million more to finish the project by late next year.
The bulk of the money has been spent on numerous studies, from surveys of how midcoast residents view issues such as local control, property rights, growth management and open spaces, to studies of truck traffic and where speeding is a problem along Route One. Several issues were found to be of ongoing concern for communities, including traffic congestion and a lack of communication between towns when it comes to local decision-making.
While the purpose of Gateway 1 is to help the state, residents and communities in the midcoast plan for the future, no one claims to know what that will look like. So, with the reams of data collected, from job growth numbers to the increase in the number of households, as well as statistics like how many people walk to work, the steering committee developed three scenarios that simulate what the midcoast might look like in 20 years, considering variables such as the future of the lobster industry and the effects of the Brunswick Naval Air Station redevelopment.
The first scenario simulates what happens if the midcoast experiences an economic boom — if Bath Iron Works' employee rolls spiked and high-tech companies flooded the Brunswick Naval Air Station, the 3,300-acre base that's scheduled to close in 2011. The second simulates what happens if growth in the midcoast continues along current trends, and the third suggests what would happen if an economic slump hits the midcoast by 2030 — if, for example, BIW was forced to close and Bank of America shuttered its midcoast operations.
But despite these three scenarios, there's one constant: the scenic quality of the midcoast will continue to deteriorate as strip development along Route One continues. The hope, according to Fuller, is that these scenarios will allow communities and the Maine DOT to tailor their plans to balance development with conserving the area's scenic charm. What's more, the scenarios may help the DOT prioritize its spending on infrastructure improvements.
The Gateway 1 project is helping communities recognize how they affect one another, according to Richert. What one town might do, such as rezoning a stretch of Route One from residential to mixed- use commercial, could have a serious impact on neighboring towns, increasing pressure on existing infrastructure, and increasing traffic. "There is sense of joint responsibility for this 100-mile corridor," Richert says. "It is at once a terrific economic asset, a vital lifeline, a gateway, a set of downtowns, and it's part of the icon that is known as midcoast Maine, and we can't screw it up."
The price of compromise
One pervasive concern about Gateway 1 has been whether regional planning would tie the hands of individual towns. The idea of "home rule" is still strong in midcoast Maine, Morris says. "[Home rule is] not going to go away," she says. "The concept of making some kind of change in that for what's perceived as a common good is not necessarily popular."
Fuller says the goal is to "maintain as much efficiencies in the highway system as we can while still providing opportunities" for the towns to pursue economic development along the corridor. That might mean developing a stretch of road but including fewer entrances and exits for gas stations or retail stores, which slow down traffic, and instead use interlocked parking lots, Fuller says. Or it might mean encouraging development in a way that preserves the aesthetic that makes the area an attractive tourist destination. In transportation and planning lingo it's called "context-sensitive design," Richert says.
The actual outcome of the project is still uncertain, but one goal of Gateway 1 is to present recommendations on how best to manage development along the corridor, like by pushing towns to adopt certain zoning ordinances, and balance that development with local concerns. Meanwhile, the project may develop a way to enforce or simply encourage communities to adopt the committee's recommendations.
Fuller says one way the DOT will likely lend weight to recommendations from the Gateway 1 project is to channel funding to communities that make an effort to adopt those recommendations. And while some may see that as a mercenary tactic, others see it as the cost of doing business. James Gillway, Searsport's town manager, says he supports Gateway 1 wholeheartedly, even if there are some concessions that might need to be made. "You may not exactly like everything coming, but at least you're there to know and expect what's coming," he says.
If the project is successful, it could be used as a model for other long-range, regional planning projects for large transportation corridors, says Richert.
In fact, Reid Ewing, an associate professor at the National Center for Smart Growth at the University of Maryland and a nationally recognized expert on transportation and community planning, already is using it as a model. Ewing, who was a consultant in the early stages of the Gateway 1 project, is consulting on a transportation project along Route 101 in northern California and at a recent meeting used Gateway 1 as an example of an innovative way to organize regional planning projects. "I think the ambition of [the project] is what distinguishes it from most corridor-level planning projects, or most context-sensitive highway design projects," Ewing says.
Whatever happens, Richert thinks the most important outcome of Gateway 1 will be the set of relationships developed between the DOT and communities, and also among communities themselves to foster collaboration in the future. "Everybody needs to understand their decisions have impacts on other people," Richert says. "That probably is the longer lasting and somewhat more important product that is going to come out of Gateway 1."
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