Vassalboro planning board approves five applications

by Mary Grow

Vassalboro Planning Board members approved all five applications on their July 10 agenda, including the Vassalboro Sanitary District’s plan for connecting Vassalboro’s sewer systems to Winslow’s and a new four-lot subdivision on Hussey Hill Road. The Sanitary District’s engineer, Richard Green, of Hoyle, Tanner and Associates, explained that the district intends to install new pipes along Route 32, in East and North Vassalboro, update equipment at existing pump stations and eliminate three sand filter treatment beds. The sand filters will have their pipes removed and be graded and seeded to look like lawns, he said.

After the connection to Winslow, Green said there will be no more discharges into Outlet Stream.

Green said bids on the work are slated to go out immediately, with construction to start in the fall and to take about a year.

Codes Enforcement Officer Richard Dolby said most of the pipeline work will be in the road right-of-way, not in the planning board’s jurisdiction. The board is needed to certify that the project is compatible with the town’s comprehensive plan – or, in Vassalboro’s case, its strategic plan – as part of the process of getting grant funding, Dolby said.

He said he and Town Manager Mary Sabins drafted a letter to that effect. Planning board members authorized Chairman Virginia Brackett to sign it.

The Hussey Hill Road subdivision is on the north side of the road beginning at the Bog Road intersection. Landowner Mona Deangelo is subdividing about 12 acres of her about 44-acre parcel into four lots, each at least two acres. William Boynton and Tyler Cutts, of Boynton Pickett, the surveying company representing her before the planning board, said each lot passed a soils test for a septic system; each will have a well.

Approval took more than an hour, mostly because board members were using for the first time the subdivision ordinance as it was amended in 2014. They questioned several of the new ordinance requirements they and voters approved, like an affidavit there had been no recent timber harvesting – not needed, they decided, since neighbors agreed the land has been a cornfield for years – and a list of E911 addresses that Dolby said would better be done after subdivision, not before.

In addition, an abutting landowner claimed one of the boundary lines is inaccurate. The abutter intends to have his own survey done.

Planning board members had a memo from Vassalboro Road Commissioner Eugene Field about a culvert under Hussey Hill Road that appeared likely to affect roadside drainage from at least two and maybe three of the lots. Approval of the subdivision was conditional on driveway culverts downhill from the cross-road culvert being large enough to carry the expected flow.

The remaining three agenda items were approved promptly and without conditions, as follows:

• Don and Denise Deane have approval to enlarge an existing bathroom by enclosing part of the deck at their seasonal cottage at 59 Birch Point Road.
• Mark Fuchswanz has approval to tear down an old camp on the lot adjoining his at 11 Birch Point Road, and to build a two-vehicle garage that will be farther from the water than the camp.
• Bernard and Jody Welch have approval to amend their Main Street subdivision – the former Volmer’s nursing home and surrounding land – by creating an additional 6.8-acre lot that has no building on it and, Dolby said, will be used as farmland.