In the latest round of the town of Standish versus the Portland Water District, a judge ruled last week that the town’s March 14 acceptance of a range road encompassing Northeast Road Extension must wait on the outcome of a pending appeal to the Maine Supreme Judicial Court.
Judge Thomas D. Warren, who wrote the five-page ruling, also orders the town “not to enter upon or make improvements upon the two one-rod wide strips” located on either side of the six-rod-wide Northeast Road Extension.
In addition, it requires the town to give three business days’ notice to the district before it begins any work on that existing right-of-way.
“The court just ruled – reiterating that Standish showed no evidence that they are entitled to our land and the two rods,” said the district’s public relations manager, Michelle Clements, in a press release last Friday.
But, according to the town’s attorney Kenneth Cole of Jensen Baird Gardner & Henry, the order is “completely preliminary.”
“It truly means nothing – a temporary stay,” Cole said. “On this issue, the judge has no idea how the Supreme Court will rule. It’s a procedural stay while we wait for the Maine Supreme Court.”
The case before Maine’s highest court to which Cole refers is Standish’s appeal of the Nov. 14, 2005 ruling by a lower court judge that determined the public does not have prescriptive rights to use the district’s land bordering either side of Northeast Road Extension adjacent to the boat launch. The ruling also struck portions of evidence supporting the town’s ownership of the two-rod strip.
Subsequent to Standish’s appeal, the district issued the town a cease and desist order, requiring that the town stop maintaining the boat launch parking lot, that the town ask permission to use the district’s land and that it relocate Northeast Road Extension to be completely in its 99-foot right-of-way by Feb. 1 of this year.
The February deadline came and went without work being done on the road. In March, Standish councilors voted to accept the eight-rod range road, located at Northeast Road Extension. The district asked the town to hold off on this decision, offering, for the first time on the night the vote was taken, to hold off their February requirement for moving the road until the appeal was decided.
“We asked them to hold off (accepting the range road) until their appeal was decided,” Clements said.
Cole looks at the issue differently.
“They should have waited for the appeal to be resolved, too,” he said.
Councilor Jeff Richardson, who chairs the Standish/PWD Steering Committee, recently talked about the events of that night.
“The lawyer at the meeting was the first time we’d heard it (the offer),” he said. “If they really wanted to do that, why at the last minute? It infuriated the council.”
Richardson maintains his position that the two sides’ elected officials need to talk – not the town manager and the district’s manager, but the town councilors and the district trustees – to come up with solutions that both sides can be comfortable with.
“I have looked at it as objectively as possible and most of the litigation has been started by the PWD,” Richardson said.
In response to Richardson’s statement, Clements agreed but added an explanation.
“That is probably true,” she said. “Because of the actions of the town council, we feel, and I would say the trustees feel, (they were) backed into a corner and we had to go to the court to get things resolved.”
Members from both the district and the town have insisted that they are eager to talk; that it is the other side that refuses. But with so much animosity, or, at the very least, such a great difference of opinion between them, it may be that the court system will continue to be the only method of communication and reconciliation between the two entities.
The ruling on Standish’s appeal is still a long way off. Final briefing will take place in a couple of weeks, according to Cole, with oral arguments scheduled for sometime this summer.
“I wouldn’t expect a ruling earlier than this fall or winter,” Cole said.
In the meantime, the boat launch, owned by Standish, remains accessible by Standish’s Northeast Road Extension, which for the present will remain partially on what is deemed to be the district’s land. This road leads to the parking lot that is owned by the district but whose ownership is being challenged on appeal – the same parking lot that is being leased from the district this summer by the state of Maine for public access during boating season.
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