BANGOR – Despite neighborhood concerns about noise, Husson College Tuesday night won two key approvals in its effort to develop a 3,000-seat baseball stadium that will serve not only the campus and the larger community but the city’s independent minor league baseball team.

Barring any unforeseen snags, the Winkin Sports Complex at Husson by next spring will become home field for the Bangor Lumberjacks, who recently completed their first season at the University of Maine facilities in Orono for lack of a suitable place to play in the city for which the team is named.

Husson President William Beardsley was pleased with the outcome of Tuesday’s meeting, which involved complex legal debate, highly technical information on noise, numerous questions from planning board members and comments from residents on both sides of the issue.

“It enables us to do things we’ve never been able to do,” he said after the more than three-hour meeting. With the additional seating, he said, the college will be able to accommodate not only its own teams and the Lumberjacks but also city-sponsored youth programs.

It also means that Husson graduates can invite members of their extended families to commencement. Beardsley said each graduate has been limited to six guests for lack of space.

Though the approval process was contentious at times, Beardsley said it was “certainly very gratifying. It raised our level of awareness of the need to work with the neighborhood.”

Husson’s willingness to abide by several voluntary conditions and its efforts to minimize noise in the neighborhood by engaging two area sound consultants were two factors that apparently influenced the board to grant the school site development approval as well as permission to modify its site location of development permit.

Though the latter permit falls under the state Department of Environmental Protection’s purview, the state had delegated its authority in the case to the city.

The potential for excessive noise was the concern most cited by residents of the neighborhood surrounding the Bangor campus. Over the summer, the Lumberjacks played 46 home games over a 95-day period.

One of the larger issues the planning panel had to grapple with Tuesday night was whether the stadium project was subject to noise regulations usually imposed by the state though its permitting process.

Bangor attorney Andrew Hamilton, one of Husson’s representatives, argued that because the field was developed in 1969 it was grandfathered. The field predated the state’s site location regulations adopted in 1970 and its sound system predated the related noise limits the state adopted in 1989. He cited a written determination from a Department of Environmental Protection official in support of that contention. The state’s rules to that end limit noise from a particular development to 60 decibels in daytime and 50 decibels at night.

Another Bangor attorney took a different view. Nathaniel Rosenblatt, a resident of Valley Avenue who has frequently spoken and written letters expressing his concern about the additional noise and traffic the project will generate, said he believed the project was in fact subject to the noise caps.

He was the first of more than a dozen opponents who addressed the board, several elderly residents among them.

In the end, the planning board determined the project was not subject to the decibel limits and as such required no variance.

As part of its effort to minimize noise, Husson hired a consultant to design a sound system that will direct noise away from nearby residents. The school also is planting hedges and other vegetation around the stadium to help absorb some of the noise.

In addition, Lumberjacks owner Charles Hutchins pledged he would begin games earlier – at 6:30 p.m. – in the future.

Other concerns cited by neighbors included traffic, which will be dealt with in a Department of Transportation traffic permit application later, and windows broken by errant baseballs.