While the long-awaited Gorham bypass will help commuters zip through Gorham, building the road will take a toll on people, property and quality of life.
Mike Danforth, the state’s senior right-of-way manager for the project’s acquisitions, confirmed this week that 40 properties would be affected. The list includes six houses and one business, which are directly in the proposed path of the road.
According to the Maine Department of Transportation, property owners will be offered fair market prices following real estate appraisals on their properties. In addition, Danforth said those having to move would get money to help defer their moving expenses.
The state will likely start construction of the 3.4-mile bypass of Gorham Village late next year. The bypass will link South Street (Route 114) with Ossipee Trail (Route 25) west of Gorham Village.
It will have two 12-foot travel lanes and will be a fenced, limited access highway. The bypass will be accessed only at intersections on routes 114, 202 and 25. A Flaggy Meadow Road bridge will carry traffic over the bypass.
Danforth said that the “actual footprint” of the 200-foot-wide swath for the bypass right-of-way would cover 91 acres.
Children and their safety
Paul and Lisa Sauvageau live on a quiet dead-end street, Briarwood Lane. Their two school-age children board the school bus on Narragansett Street (Route 202) because Briarwood Lane doesn’t have a school bus turnaround.
The Gorham bypass will intersect with Narragansett Street close to where her children now board school buses. Blue surveying stakes now mark where the bypass will intersect with the existing road.
“We’re really talking about children and their safety,” Lisa Sauvageau said.
With a third child entering kindergarten this fall, she’s worried about safety for her family as well as other children in the neighborhood.
Sauvageau now walks four round trips daily to the school bus stop on Narragansett Street from her home at the end of Briarwood Lane.
She was at her familiar post waiting for her son, Joseph, who is in fifth grade at the Villge School, to get off the school bus recently. Another school bus driver waves, as he passed by. “They know me,” she said.
Sauvageau wonders where a school bus would pick up her children in the future.
State transportation engineers haven’t designed the bypass intersection, which could be a rotary. She said the bypass would divert a lot of traffic from downtown to her neighborhood. “Ten thousand cars a day,” she said.
She attended the recent informational meeting, but was disappointed in answers to her questions about safety. “They seemed to brush us off,” she said.
She said there are no sidewalks now. Once the road is finished, she said she might have to drive her children to school.
Money in the bank
Pauline Washburn of Washburn Drive is a widow worried about the value of her land after a bypass takes a slice.
But she’s glad the bypass isn’t wiping out her house. “I’m fortunate compared to some people whose homes are being taken,” Washburn said.
Washburn doesn’t know exactly how much the bypass would strip from her 14 acres or what she’d be paid. She said last week she had yet to hear from state appraisers.
For Washburn, her land was money in the bank. She had planned to sell her property in the future as house lots to allow her to afford to stay in her home, which has a lot of memories. She and her late husband, Richard Washburn, built it 66 years ago.
They did the work themselves before he went off to World War II. The couple dug the foundation by hand. The couple raised their family there. They enjoyed riding and once kept saddle horses there.
Now Washburn said her ability to remain in the house is threatened. She said noise of the traffic would lower the value of her property and didn’t think her taxes would reflect it.
“It won’t make any difference in taxes, believe me,” Washburn said.
Displaced after a decade
Joe Nixon lives near the top of Brandy Brook Hill on Ossipee Trail. The bypass, which will intersect there, will take his home.
“I’m going to be displaced,” said Nixon, who has been there for a decade. “It’s not the American way.”
Nixon said he planned on living out his life there. “I figured my next stop would be Calvary Cemetery,” said Nixon, 54.
Nixon has complained to state bypass planners that the intersection would be dangerous. He said the intersection should be placed farther to the west. At the informational meeting, Ray Faucher of the Maine Department of Transportation said planners had to avoid streams, wetlands, flood plains and natural resources.
Nixon has seen 37 slow-moving dump trucks entering Ossipee Trail from a nearby stone quarry in an hour. He said a mix of those trucks with fast moving big rigs driven by “cowboys” coming down from Standish combined with a bypass intersection would be dangerous.
Nixon said no one has said he’s wrong. “It’s the wrong road for safety reasons,” Nixon said. “It’s dangerous.”
With the specter of the bypass looming in recent years, Nixon delayed plans to pave his driveway. He said he’s been in limbo for four or five years.
He expects to hear the state’s offer this summer. “I’ve told them they need to treat me fairly,” Nixon said.
‘Going to destroy the land’
Wilbur Hansen of Waterhouse Road bought his 100-acre farm in 1961. The bypass, he believes, will cutoff about 20 acres from his property.
He and his neighbor, Connie Riechel, would both lose fields. “It looks like they purposely headed for our fields,” he said.
Hansen, 72, once raised turnips on his land, and he still cuts the hay and manicures his fields. “It looks like a lawn,” he said.
Hansen questioned the alignment of the bypass. He asked why couldn’t it have been pushed to the west, a move that would have saved prime farmland. “It seems this road is so poorly designed,” Hansen said.
The bypass would leave “hundreds” of acres landlocked, Hansen said. But he believed the state would buy property landlocked by the bypass. However, he said an access road would have opened that land for use.
He suggested that the bypass path should have gone straight across to Ossipee Trail from Route 22.
He said the town legally tied up 10 acres of his land off Weeks Road in 2001 for a bypass path after he declined to give the town the right of first refusal for that property. But now, Hansen said a different bypass route has been proposed.
“They tied up my property,” he said. “I’ve never heard back from them that they’ve released it.”
Connie Riechel said the bypass would divide her 90-acre farm that lies in the path of the bypass. “It’s going to destroy the land,” Riechel said.
She moved to the farm in 1976. Ten years ago, she spent a “lot of money” to reclaim the fields.
Hansen hays the fields. “I think it ruins the value of her farm,” Hansen said about the bypass.
Riechel believes the bypass would claim more than half the farm. She said it looks like it would take up to 30 acres of her fields and all 40 acres of woodland.
Riechel, a nurse, said when she looks out from her home she sees moose, deer, coyotes and turkeys. Riechel enjoys the beauty and the tranquility of the scene. “Now I’m going to see these trucks,” Riechel said.
She doesn’t like the bypass alignment. “If this road made sense, it would be OK,” Riechel said.
She said intersections on South Street and Ossipee Trail would be unsafe and pointed to traffic jams on Route 22. “It’s going to be a boondoggle,” she said.
She also said the bypass alignment was over a hill and has a sharp curve. “I think they should have looked at a regional plan that would be safe,” she said.
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