PRESQUE ISLE – The “biggest town meeting in Maine’s history” on Tuesday night drew a smaller-than-anticipated crowd to discuss concerns about the Maine Department of Transportation’s preferred route for the proposed extension of Interstate 95.

Organizers said, however, that the meeting illustrated an important point – those who attended want the DOT to build the highway somewhere else.

Approximately 60 residents at the meeting did not reach a consensus on which route identified in the Department of Transportation’s Aroostook County Transportation Study could better serve the area, but they did pass a resolution for the Department of Transportation to halt work on its preferred route, which would bypass Houlton and Presque Isle and cut through Maine’s Historic Swedish Colony.

No Department of Transportation officials attended the meeting.

The group voted 40-0 to request that the DOT defer preparation of its final environmental impact study, which would focus on the preferred corridor, in favor of a revised draft environmental impact study that would look at alternative routes and include an additional public comment period.

Meeting participants pointed out that the group of County residents did not pass the resolution in any official capacity, but as a group of concerned residents who met to discuss the issue and find a mutually agreeable solution.

Approximately 20 other people who were at the meeting did not vote on the resolution, which also requested that the Department of Transportation produce a detailed study of potential economic benefits and detriments for each community affected by the project.

“This is coming like a railroad train, like a freight train at us,” Paul Cyr of Madawaska said of the highway project.

If residents don’t jump on the train and try to steer it in a better direction, it’s going to run everyone over, he said.

Though the project to extend I-95 north of Houlton has been discussed for the past 10 years, some residents said they had no idea how their towns were being affected until it was “too late.”

Meeting organizer Brenda Jepson said after the meeting that New Sweden area residents didn’t know the Department of Transportation’s preferred route would cut through the Maine Swedish Colony until October 2003, a year and a half after the DOT held a public hearing on the four proposed corridors in the draft environmental impact study and closed the public comment period on the study.

If they had known the preferred route was going to affect 19 miles of Maine’s Historic Swedish Colony, there would have been a crowd of New Sweden residents at the public hearing in March 2002, Jepson said.

With that comment period over, she said, residents have only a small window of opportunity to effect any changes in the project and the Tuesday night meeting was a step in the right direction.

Cyr agreed.

“We’re not anti-highway. We want a good transportation system in Aroostook County,” he said.

“But we want to be involved and we want what’s going to work best for the whole area,” he said.