Overlay would help set up housing project

GREENVILLE — For more than a year the Northern Forest Center has been working on a Spruce Street housing project with the town of Greenville, Moosehead Lake Region Economic Development Corp., and Northern Light CA Dean Hospital to bring middle-income housing to the community to help remedy the housing issues near Moosehead Lake. The site is 5 acres on Spruce Street off Pritham Avenue.

To help bring the project to fruition an overlay would need to be approved. An overlay is an additional layer of planning control for properties in a clearly defined area with a specified set of regulations. Greenville currently has three overlays, a scenic corridor, another for water preservation, and the shoreland zoning district.

During an Oct. 23 meeting the Greenville Planning Board gave its approval to accepting the proposal from the Northern Forest Center for a housing district. 

A public hearing is planned for Wednesday, Nov. 1 prior to the regular back-to-back planning board and select board meetings. If the select board votes to approve the proposed overlay at its Nov. 15 meeting then a special town meeting would be scheduled. 

Planning Board Chairperson John Contreni introduced Northern Forest Center Senior Program Director Mike Wilson who joined over Zoom. Contreni said Wilson first came before the board with the concept in June 2022.

“We’re a regional non-profit, we work on rural economic and community development programs all across northern Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, and New York,” Wilson said. “Over the last five or so years we’ve increasingly found ourselves responding to the need or lack of quality, affordable middle-income housing in rural communities.” 

Wilson said the Northern Forest Center has found this everywhere it works and “We are acutely aware this is a critical issue there in Greenville.”

He said the agency’s primary interest is to address a lack of attainably priced housing. “Just to be clear, we don’t have any imminent plans to pursue official income-restricted affordable housing as we traditionally think of that,” Wilson said.

“Really our work is focused on hitting that missing middle between the kind of income-restricted affordable housing and the million dollar homes that we see plenty of tending to go up these days,” he said.

Wilson said the housing project is likely to be built in phases. “We’re very interested and committed to developing quality appealing housing that will help attract people, particularly young people, to communities and working to help ensure that our work is catalyzing additional investment and business development in the communities that we work,” he said.

An immediate challenge for the site is a lack of existing town water and sewer. “That’s a significant cost factor that needs to be addressed to pursue any kind of development at any kind of scale at this property,” Wilson said.

He said the Northern Forest Center has worked with the town to essentially secure a $991,708 grant from Northern Border Regional Commission. An additional $265,000 to be raised by Northern Forest Center will also help offset the costs for sewer and water extensions, stormwater collection installation, and construction of a new road and sidewalks onto the property.

“None of this is going to go superfast,” Wilson said, mentioning an environmental review is needed before ground can be broken. He said the hope is to have work start next spring.

“This is a critical development for the community in general,” Wilson said. “Regardless of any proposal that we might move forward, just in terms of extending this infrastructure to what I think folks generally consider the most developable kind of prime downtown parcel in town to essentially make it developable going forward.”

The Spruce Street acreage is in the village zone and the Northern Forest Center is requesting a few modifications to the land use ordinance through an overlay. The organization would like to see are no minimum lot size, no minimum setbacks from property lines, no maximum lot coverage, no minimum frontage, and no maximum height.

Mentioning the three existing overlay districts, Contreni said, “It’s not a completely new departure from how we designate the land use in the town of Greenville.”

Contrenti said should the proposal be approved by the select board next month then a special town meeting warrant article will need to specify all the language of the amendments to the land use ordinance. The Northern Forest Center will work on this with Town Manager Mike Roy.

The Oct. 23 planning board was rescheduled from five days prior due to a lack of a quorum. The group currently has five members but both alternate positions are vacant. Contreni invited everyone to spread the word and encouraged residents to apply for the alternate spots.

Last month Contreni said the planning board is looking to amend its by-laws to change the meeting quorum for the 5-member group from four to three members. This would need to first be approved by the select board, who would decide whether to send the amendment to a special town meeting vote (this can be added to the warrant whenever a session is scheduled for another matter such as the Spruce Street housing overlay). The by-laws have been in place since the establishment of the planning board in 1988, and there have been several amendments since then.