Driving home from Castle Hill’s annual town meeting last March, Ewen Allison was upset. He, like many from the small Aroostook County town, had voted in favor of an updated land use ordinance that night. It easily passed.
But he hadn’t actually read the ordinance.
“It seemed innocuous enough. I wasn’t planning on building anything,” Allison said. “Then I started leafing through … I was shocked. I was angry at myself.”
In the table outlining permitted land uses, schools, hospitals and libraries are all marked “no,” meaning they are not authorized to operate within the town. The language had been in the ordinance for years, but Allison had never noticed it.
Castle Hill, population 373 at the 2020 census, does not have any of those facilities. It may never have them. Its small population and proximity to Mapleton and Presque Isle make it an unlikely location for them to be developed.
But on the off chance that someone would ever want to start one, Allison thought, why shouldn’t they be allowed? He objected on principle.
“Even if no one is going to have one, why ban them?” Allison said. “It’s a silly thing to ban. It just makes no sense. I decided before I even went home that I’d work to change it, and here we are.”
He spent about $500 this month to mail 235 postcards to his neighbors across Castle Hill to inform them of the prohibition and encourage them to come to the town meeting next week to vote in favor of changing the ordinance.
A month prior, Allison reached out to Sandra Fournier, the town manager of Castle Hill, Chapman and Mapleton, seeking to put an article on the town meeting warrant to repeal the ban.
Later that same day, Fournier told him the town was preparing to remove the language in the ordinance to present for approval at the March town meeting.
It’s not as if the town is intentionally banning the entities, Fournier told the Bangor Daily News. Castle Hill and neighboring Chapman, population 491 — where schools, hospitals and libraries are also not permitted — are both entirely zoned for residential, agricultural and forest use.
Those zones, by default, do not typically allow for commercial or institutional developments, she said.
Given the uniqueness of the situation, Castle Hill’s Select Board is “willing to amend” the land use table, Fournier said. Under the change, a school, hospital or library could be proposed and would be reviewed by the town’s planning board for approval.
That’s the change Allison is looking for. The amendment will be put to a vote at Castle Hill’s annual town meeting, set for 7 p.m. on March 17 at the Mapleton Fire Department.
“Even if one of my neighbors or any of my neighbors are happy with the situation the way it is, they should still come and vote on the ordinance,” Allison said. “Their vote is going to matter. It matters as much as mine does, and anyone else who thinks we ought to have a school or a library or a hospital, or even it make it O.K. to have any of those things.”