Daily: May 31, 2014

By Michael Kelley, Staff Writer. May 30, 2014, The Scarborough Leader.

Officials from the Eastern Trail Management District have long dreamed of a time when a bicyclist, runner or walker could continuously travel off-road from the Piscataqua River in Kittery to Casco Bay in South Portland. Now, thanks to funding from the Portland Area Comprehensive Transportation System (PACTS), that dream is a little bit closer to happening.

The communities of Scarborough and South Portland recently received $350,000 from PACTS to extend the Eastern Trail from Pleasant Hill Road in Scarborough to Wainwright Field in South Portland. The .8 mile trail, once completed, will go from Wainwright Field through the woods past Prouts Pond along Central Maine Power property before connecting to Pleasant Hill Road.

“We have advertised this as a trail between Kittery and Casco Bay and with this, now we are getting closer and closer to making that a reality,” said Eastern Trail Management District President Tad Redway.

The Eastern Trail passes through a dozen communities in York and Cumberland counties and is part of the East Coast Greenway, a 2,900-mile corridor that spans Maine to Florida.

Scarborough Town Planner Dan Bacon said the total cost of the project is $531,000. The remainder of the funding comes from money South Portland had already set aside for trail expansion.

“There was already money waiting to be used, but not enough for the entire .8 miles,” Bacon said.

Bacon said the plan is to finalize designs and get permitting approval this summer and fall and start construction in late fall or early winter. The money, Bacon said, was not supposed to be available for another year or two, but given the fact money had already been appropriated and PACTS had some money left over in its fiscal budget, the organization decided to use some of that money to fund the project.

The trail expansion project, Bacon said, coincides with a two-year project by the Maine Department of Transportation and the Scarborough Department of Public Works to reconstruct Pleasant Hill Road and make it more pedestrian friendly.

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By Shelby Carignan, Staff Writer. Friday, May 30, 2014. The Forecaster.

SCARBOROUGH — Officials confirmed that the town has received enough funding to begin closing the gap in the Eastern Trail between South Portland and Scarborough.

Though the $376,000 from the Portland Area Comprehensive Transportation System will not complete the 1.5-mile section from the Nonesuch River in Scarborough to Wainwright Athletic Complex in South Portland, it green-lights construction on a smaller segment just under a mile long from Wainwright to Pleasant Hill Road. 

Construction will likely begin late this year or early in 2015.

Nearly a third of the pedestrian and bike trail, which extends 65 miles from Bug Light Park in South Portland to Kittery, is completely off-road, according to Robert Hamblen, president of the Eastern Trail Alliance. The ultimate goal is to connect the entire trail via pedestrian pathways. 

The segment from Arundel to South Portland is 85 percent off-road, with the two most prominent interruptions remaining between Saco and Biddeford, and Scarborough and South Portland. The Maine Department of Transportation has studied plans to close those gaps, and determined that both require bridges.

“Both of them are expensive, but we firmly believe both will happen,” Hamblen said. “They’ve just both been laying there waiting for funding to make it possible.”

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