MILBRIDGE, Maine — A special town meeting to consider a moratorium on multifamily housing developments has been scheduled for this week.
Lewis Pinkham, Milbridge’s town manager, said Friday that the meeting will be held at 7 p.m. Thursday, May 14, at the town hall on School Street.
Pinkham said that if voters approve the moratorium it would be retroactive to April 8, when selectmen voted to support the measure.
“That is the only thing on the warrant,” Pinkham said of the moratorium question.
Town officials decided to endorse the moratorium after local residents raised concerns about a proposed apartment building for local farmworkers on Wyman Road. Milbridge needs time to put appropriate building standards in place because Milbridge’s zoning ordinances now cover only subdivisions and the shoreland zone, Pinkham has said.
Officials at Mano en Mano, a local nonprofit community organization that is pursuing the building project, have said the building would house farmworkers and their families who already live in the area year round. It would not be for migrant workers, who move in and out of the region with the seasons as they travel to find work, the officials have said.
Mano en Mano has applied for and received a $1 million grant from U.S. Department of Agriculture to help cover construction costs. The building is needed, according to Mano en Mano officials, because much of the housing in the area currently occupied by farmworkers is crowded and substandard.
Some people who live near the proposed building site on Wyman Road have signed a petition expressing their concerns about the proposal. The site is on a curve in the road that could prove dangerous for vehicles trying to enter and exit the proposed driveway, opponents have said, and the building’s well and septic systems could have an adverse effect on the area’s groundwater resources.
They also have suggested that, because the building will be owned and maintained by a nonprofit organization, it will not contribute to the local tax base even though it likely will place an added burden on local municipal services.
“There’s no work at all here,” Wyman Road resident Daniel Pride has said. “The jobs are needed by the local people.”
But according to Mano en Mano officials, others in the community support the project.
One of them is Morna Bell, the local librarian of 20 years. A Wyman Road resident, Bell said she does not know whether the proposed site is a good one for the building. She does support the construction of more low-income housing in the area, however. Many of the people who have moved to Milbridge to work in agricultural or other natural resources-based industries have “pretty dire” housing, she said.
Industries that have attracted workers to the Milbridge area over the past several years include blueberry farms, wreath-making operations and seafood processing.
Bell said that though many such workers in the area originally are from Latin America, anyone who works at a local farm or in a related job can qualify for residency in the USDA-funded building. An applicant’s ethnicity or national origin will not be considered, she said.
Bell, who indicated she likely will vote against the moratorium, said that even if the site turns out not to be a good one, she hopes the building will be built somewhere within walking distance of downtown Milbridge. That way, farmworker families already living in town won’t have to move away, she said.
“I think it is needed, regardless of who lives there,” Bell said. “I think it would be a nice thing for the town.”
