Driving into Winterport, a roadside sign shows a schooner at full sail and reads: “Winterport, an old river town.”
The Penobscot River forms the town’s entire eastern border. But finding a place where the public can get to the water’s edge is a problem.
“As a young family, we love living in Winterport,” said Lily Calderwood, who chairs the town’s conservation commission. “But there isn’t any public access to the water, or even a place to walk along the water.”
The best view of the water is from the Freshies gas station’s parking lot, she said.
“It would be absolutely wonderful to have a public park or even just a trail along the water,” she said.
Every town along the lower stretch of the Penobscot River has some sort of public access point on the river, be it a boat launch, walking trail, park or nature preserve. Except for Winterport.
Over the years, the town has tried different ways of creating public access to the waterfront, said longtime town council member Stephen Cooper. The will is there, he said.
“It just hasn’t worked out,” he said.
There are multiple reasons. The COVID-19 pandemic derailed one effort, and last year the town considered retaining a waterfront property it acquired through tax foreclosure, but decided not to pursue it amid legal questions and community concerns.
“We’re thwarted,” said Mary Anne Royal, who has been involved in several efforts. “The town is continually thwarted in its attempts to provide access.”
It’s unusual for a coastal town like Winterport, which is on a tidal stretch of the river, not to have some sort of public shoreline access, said Paul Dest, who has worked on coastal access and conservation issues for 30 years.
“It is rare for a community or a municipality not to have some sort of publicly owned land that would provide people with access to tidal waters,” said Dest, who recently retired from the Wells Reserve at Laudholm Farm and was formerly a senior planner for coastal access at the Maine Coastal Program.
Calderwood, as the conservation commission chair, is spearheading the town’s latest effort to acquire waterfront land. Last year, a piece of land came on the market — a wooded 47-acre parcel at a bend in the river in North Winterport with 3,700 feet of water frontage — for $1 million.
“We saw the listing for that property, and we said, ‘Oh my gosh, this would be beautiful. Wouldn’t it be amazing to have it as a town park with trails?’” she recalls.
The property has river views and some trails, including one that leads to a small cove. Calderwood imagines adding a camp site and making the park part of the Maine Island Trail, a network of camping and day visit sites with more than 400 island and mainland stops along the coast.
Calderwood and others on the commission began researching grants the town could use to buy the land last year, all the while hoping that someone with $1 million doesn’t swoop in and buy the land before the town has its funding in order.
Calderwood plans to help the town apply for a grant from the Land and Water Conservation Fund, a federal program that grants up to half of the funds needed to acquire land for public outdoor recreation. Applications are due in June.
But as the conservation commission started preparing to apply, an unexpected problem cropped up: More than 40 years ago, the town used a $29,500 grant from the same fund to develop a recreation area, called Abbott Park. According to the terms of the agreement, the town agreed to “operate the facilities in a first-class manner for the use of the general public.”
An inspector visited the park in September and found several deficiencies. The site was not open at all times, and it did not meet handicap accessibility standards, according to a copy of the inspection report.
Al Barton, Winterport’s recreation department director, said that in his nearly 40 years as director, he had never heard of any issues with the park.
“It kind of came as a shock,” he said.
Barton met this week with a representative from the program. He will need to install signs, update the site plan, and take photos of the play structure and picnic table to bring the park into compliance.
“It’s not going to be hard at all,” Barton said.
“I was told that when these tasks were completed we would be in compliance and then could apply for grants,” he said.
Last year, the town council asked a group of residents to explore another option: the former Midcoast Marine marina, which the town foreclosed on after property taxes went unpaid. The town formed a committee and gave it six months to see if it would be feasible to keep the large riverfront property and turn it into a public park.
It was not a straightforward assignment. The marina’s owner died in 2019, but several of his family members still live on the property. There is at least one business operating from the parcel. And there are so many abandoned boats, cars and scrap materials there that the town’s code enforcement officer classified it as an “illegal junkyard” in a report submitted to the town.
The committee also ran into a range of legal questions, its reports to the town show. Among them: Who would be responsible for evicting people from the property and cleaning it up if the town chose not to sell it?
Rumors started to spread that the town was going to evict people from their homes on the property. And some in town opposed the idea of spending money on a property or removing it from the property tax rolls.
In October, the committee asked the council for more time so it could conduct a public survey about waterfront access, council meeting videos show.
But the council declined to extend the committee’s term. It even declined to reimburse the $125 that members of the committee had spent from their own pockets to test the soil for hazardous materials.
Sundance Campbell, who served on the committee, saw the writing on the wall.
“Why spend any more time on that, especially when there’s a lot of emotion around that property, and there’s people that live on that property?” he said.
Cooper, the town councilor, declined to comment on the situation. “That’s nothing that’s going to be discussed,” he said. “It’s still kind of a mess.”
Since the town dropped the idea of retaining the former marina, there has been some talk of restarting a different committee, the Waterfront Access Committee, that had a lot of energy but went dormant during the pandemic.
One former member, Donna Gilbert, said she hopes the group gets back to work. She’s lived in Winterport for 49 years, and remembers seeing big ships using private local docks to load up with frozen fish and chicken.
“There were Russian [sailors] in downtown Winterport,” she said.
Gilbert says a lot of younger people have become active in the community and are bringing new energy that she thinks will finally help the “old river town’s” residents get access to the water.
“It’s got to happen,” she said.
