New study focuses on waterfront development

With people in Bangor and Brewer renewing their interest in the Penobscot River, city officials are trying to plan for orderly growth.

Toward that end, the cities appointed a committee to study the river its problems and its potential. The committee hired a consultant. The consultant just issued a draft report. And the committee plans to hold a hearing for the public on the report written by the consultant about the Bangor-Brewer waterfront.

It is not the first consultant’s report on the area.

While previous studies have looked at the waterfront land, John Lord, Bangor planner, said, the report offers recommendations on how best to develop the harbor itself and maintain access to the water.

The report written by T.Y. Lin International, a consulting firm from Falmouth, contains a series of recommendations, plans and sample ordinances. The Bangor-Brewer Harbor Management Study Committee will hold its hearing at 4:30 p.m. Thursday, July 19, in the chambers of the Bangor City Council on the third floor of Bangor City Hall.

In the past, each city has approached its waterfront differently, with Bangor taking the lead with the Penobscot River Waterfront Redevelopment Plan and creating the Waterfront Development Zone, an attempt to recognize the area’s unique characteristics and tailor a land-use policy for it.

Lin’s work uncovers no startingly new or innovative suggestions but does outline some guidelines for Bangor and Brewer to follow. “It attempts to formalize a lot of things like access and a mooring plan that had just been topics for discussion in the past,” Lord said.

The report includes three possiblities for improving boating facilities on the Brewer side of the river — improving the boat ramp or building a dock at the Conservation Pond, building a boat ramp near the old Bangor-Brewer Bridge, and building a marina just upstream from the sewage treatment plant.

In addition to being able to get to the river, the consultants hold that visual access should be a major consideration in future plans. “This is not a new idea,” the authors of the report write. “The city of Brewer has been considering a walkway for some time. … The proposed Water Access Plan is designed to link the Brewer walkway with the Bangor waterfront creating a broader riverfront walkway.”

As for the river itself, the report presents two plans for coping with the growing demand for moorings. One has room for a total of 69 boats, maintains a navigational channel along the Bangor half of the river, and places all the moorings on the Brewer side of the river or upstream of the Joshua Chmberlain Bridge.

The second proposal has room for 67 boats. In it, the navigational channel splits the anchorage downstream of the Joshua Chamberlain Bridge.

The study was part of the state’s requirement for Coastal Zone Planning. The cost of the $30,000 program was divided three ways with Brewer and Bangor each paying 25 percent and the state paying 50 percent.