Big Moose Township rezoning decision on hold until May

By Mike Lange
Staff Writer

    GREENVILLE — After two consecutive meetings of the Maine Land Use Planning Commission were postponed due to bad weather in March, a decision won’t be made on the C&E Real Estate rezoning request in Big Moose Township until May.
    The LUPC staff has recommended approval of the revised zoning request, but the agency routinely takes a respite from meetings in April, said Rodney Folsom of Folsom Real Estate, who is representing C&E. “The staff has made its recommendation, so the only thing lacking now is an official board vote,” Folsom told the Observer.

    LUPC decisions have to be made in a public forum, he explained. “This gives anyone who has concerns about the proposal an opportunity to testify if they wish,” Folsom said. “But we feel pretty good about this. My only concern is that we’ll have to come back with a subdivision application later on. So it may be late summer before everything is completed.”
    Esther and Charles Wagenheim of Pittsford, Vt., the principals of C&E Real Estate LLC, own approximately 46.1 acres on Big Moose Township while Adam Moskovitz of Bangor owns an adjacent 4.8-acre lot.
    The original application asked that the entire parcel be changed from General Management/Great Pond Protection to Residential Development so they could develop the land into 13 house lots, citing the demand for premium vacation homes in the Moosehead Lake region. They’ve owned the property since 2005.
    But Hugh Coxe, a senior planner with LUPC, recommended that the panel oppose the first application because of LUPC’s general guidelines that any property to be rezoned must be one mile or less away from any other compatible development.
    The Wagenheim’s property is approximately 1.9 miles by road from a subdivision developed with seven dwellings. “The proposal to rezone 50.9 acres to accommodate 13 lots would roughly double the scale and intensity of this compatible development,” Coxe wrote. “Such an increase is inconsistent with the type and intensity component of the adjacency principle and, therefore, inconsistent with this principle and the CLUP (comprehensive land use plan).”
    So LUPC tabled the application, and the Wagenheim’s filed a new one asking for only 18.8 acres to be rezoned instead of the whole 50.9-acre parcel. There would be seven lots developed from 1 to 3.5 acres, some with up to 200 feet of frontage on Moosehead Lake. The property would be accessed from the existing land management road that enters off Route 6/15.
    The LUPC staff has recommended approval of the revised plan, noting that “the unique features demonstrate the area proposed for rezoning satisfies the adjacency principle, even though the property is farther than one road mile from similar development.”
    The lots are five miles from Greenville, abuts a “commercial railroad that already breaks up a large tract … of land” and are less than three miles from Big Squaw Mountain Ski Resort, which has undergone a major revival this year.
    The exact date and location of the next LUPC meeting will be announced in late April.