March 29, 2024
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Ellsworth building moratorium effort delayed

ELLSWORTH – A local group trying to put a building moratorium out to referendum will have to wait until November instead of having the issue on the primary ballot next month.

Citizens Organized for Responsible Development, a group of residents who want to enact a moratorium on large-scale retail development in Ellsworth, is a few signatures short of getting the moratorium question put on the June 11 ballot, the group’s spokeswoman said Tuesday.

Instead, CORD has set its sights on the general election in November, she said.

Audrey Tunney, CORD spokeswoman, said Tuesday the group is close to the city’s requirement of 1,104 petition signatures of registered voters to have the proposal put out to referendum. That figure represents 20 percent of the registered voters in Ellsworth as of the most recent gubernatorial election in 1998, she said.

“The petition campaign is still alive,” Tunney said. “We need 45 signatures to hit the target.”

For the June primary, CORD will have representatives at the polling stations for each of the city’s four voting wards trying to get the needed additional signatures, she said.

The moratorium would be for 180 days and would apply to any retail construction or expansion of 40,000 square feet or more on a developed site and to any retail construction of 80,000 square feet or more on an undeveloped site, according to Tunney.

Because the city is not expected to finish updating its comprehensive plan for several months, it makes sense not to enact the moratorium until after the revised document is complete, Tunney said.

Ellsworth City Manager Tim King, a member of the city’s comprehensive plan review committee, said Wednesday the new plan is not expected to be complete until next spring.

The purpose of the moratorium is not to slow growth, Tunney said, but to allow the city’s comprehensive plan to be updated and its ordinances changed to promote planned growth.

“We are hugely supportive of the comprehensive planning effort,” Tunney said.

Since September 2000, CORD twice has approached the City Council about having the moratorium enacted but each time has been rebuffed. During that time, the group also has collected petition signatures in order to make the city put the issue out to a referendum.

Growth in the city, however, has not progressed at the pace expected two years ago when several large-scale projects were approved for construction,. Two of those projects, a 28,000-square-foot office building on Route 1 and a 210,000-square-foot Wal-Mart Supercenter on Route 3, since have been canceled.

John Linnehan Jr., whose Linnehan’s Credit Now car company proposed to build the Route 1 office building, said last year those plans were shelved so the company could develop new computer software.

Wal-Mart officials said the expected costs of the traffic mitigation requirements demanded by the state were too high to proceed at the proposed site at the intersection of Route 3 and Myrick Street.

A 116,000-square-foot The Home Depot was built and opened last year on Myrick Street, but construction of the remaining 200,000 square feet of the Acadia Crossing development, which now includes The Home Depot, has yet to begin.

Tunney said people interested in the moratorium could contact the group at CORD@prexar.com or 667-0921.

Correction: An article printed in the May 2 edition of Maine Day included an incorrect phone number for the Ellsworth group Citizens Organized for Responsible Development. The correct phone number is 667-0291.

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