ELLSWORTH, Maine — City councilors on Monday approved the $155,000 purchase of a State Street home to make way for a new driveway to Ellsworth High School.
City Manager Michelle Beal said the purchase of the 2.5-acre 277 State St. property will allow the city to eliminate the current high school entryway and its traffic light by creating a new four-way intersection at State Street and Forest Avenue.
That intersection also will relieve traffic created by Ellsworth’s new K-8 school, accessed by Forest Avenue, which Beal estimates has added about 600 cars to area traffic each day.
The current high school entrance “is very odd, very difficult,” Beal said. The traffic light was built at the entry to an abutting apartment complex but isn’t aligned with that facility’s entrance, making for an awkward traffic flow.
The city first considered engineering a new driveway four years ago but put the plan on the back burner when cost estimates for the driveway and related utility work approached $1 million.
Beal said the purchase of 277 State St. will drop that price dramatically by eliminating the need to call on eminent domain, a costly legal maneuver that would have allowed the city to put the driveway through the property without buying it.
To save money, the city will wait until the Maine Department of Transportation comes to tear up State Street from the Union River Bridge to High Street. Beal said the state is drawing preliminary plans to redo that stretch of road, and when it does, the city will lay the stormwater, wastewater and other utility lines necessary for the new high school driveway.
“This makes it so much easier to design what we need to design, take the rights we need to take, and then decide whether we’re going to utilize the building,” said City Council Chairman Gary Fortier.
Beal estimates the state will come to raze the road in two to four years. In the meantime, she recommended the city use the home on the property for fire training.
“And by fire training, I mean burn it,” she said after the meeting.
Follow BDN reporter Mario Moretto on Twitter at @riocarmine.
All I can say is…IT’S ABOUT TIME!!!! This is something that should have been considered 10 years ago.
You should feel lucky. Most beneficial road projects in this state come to fruition 20-30 years late.
Probably about the time they built the EHS.
Nobody in Ellsworth has a camera? An article like this requires a picture.
Why? Those of us who live here know the situation. The current setup is so out of line and not good traffic flow.
But for some reason, our taxes have to go way up to pay for the RSU being more expensive.
My question would be why the state is going to tear up State St from the bridge to High St (which I believe should actually be Oak St since High St stops at the intersection with Main St). There is nothing wrong with this section of road unlike many others in the area (I can personally speak to North St and the intersection with Route 1A at Sunrise Glass being a complete and total mess and no, routing traffic from Route 180 out through Boggey Brook is not going to solve the problem). Moving the entrance to the high school to meet Forest Ave is actually a great idea.
Wait a couple of years and you’ll change your mind about that stretch notneeding work. Thats about when this project will take place if not longer. Oak st. is as much of a disaster as North St.
I agree with you completely about Oak St and if that’s the road they were talking about I’d have no questions. But since they are talking about State St, where they just did a bunch of work to put in the turn lane onto the Shore Rd, I’m not sure why they are talking about tearing that up. Please, rip up Oak St and quit just patching it every couple of months. I’m tired of fixing tires and struts on the right hand side of my vehicle. And one of the biggest issues with the North St intersection is the railroad tracks that need to be ripped out and paved over since the patching only lasts until the next rain storm.