There’s one thing the city of Ellsworth will have to do if it wants the state to build a new courthouse about 1,000 feet off busy High Street.
It will have to pay for a new access road to the site.
City officials continue to try to iron out details of a proposal in which the state would build a new courthouse to serve Hancock County off the city’s main commercial thoroughfare, instead of on Surry Road.
The state court system is gradually phasing out some of its older properties, and the discussions around the Ellsworth courthouse have highlighted how the city still sees room for growth along its busiest stretch of commercial real estate.
Surry Road residents have been fighting for months against the state’s plans to build a new courthouse in their neighborhood, saying it could create traffic problems in the area and jar with its residential atmosphere.
Ellsworth officials took up the Surry Road residents’ cause this summer and have been vetting other potential sites where the state could build. The current courthouse downtown on State Street is not up to modern safety and technology standards, state officials have said, and a new one cannot be effectively built at the same site, which also houses county government offices and lacks room for expansion.
A landlocked parcel east of High Street, which the owner is willing to sell, has become the leading potential alternate location. The property behind Merrill Furniture is away from residential neighborhoods but still would be in the city’s densely developed commercial corridor, which state officials have said is a prerequisite for any new courthouse.
The one issue is getting to the site, which would be accessed from where Merrill Lane is now. If the state opted instead to build at 120 Surry Rd., the 17-acre site it already has purchased, it would take on the work of building a driveway onto that property. But the state doesn’t want to build a 1,000-foot-long access road from High Street across abutting properties to the site the city is proposing.
Mike Harris, the city’s public works director, has suggested the city build the 1,000-foot access road, and the city council has not ruled that out. The benefit of having the city foot the bill is that it would spare Surry Road residents from unwelcome development in their neighborhood, and it would open up other surrounding properties off Merrill Lane to potential development. If planned properly, the city could protect Card Brook, which abuts the property, and would generate more tax revenue for Ellsworth.
If the city hired a construction firm to put in the 1,000-foot driveway, it likely would cost $1.2 million, Harris told city councilors on Thursday. But if the city builds it, including utility infrastructure to the site but not including paving — which it would contract out — it likely would cost “several hundred thousand dollars less,” he added.
“We can build it,” Harris said. “We feel confident that it is not a difficult project.”
State officials have said that if the city can come up with a plan on how to provide access to its preferred site, they would be amenable to a land swap in which the state would be given ownership of that property and in return would either give 120 Surry Rd. to the city or the owner of the site off Merrill Lane.
Larry Gardner, the city’s assessor, said that if the road and associated utilities were built off the end of Merrill Lane, it would increase the assessed value of the land and other properties served by the access road to around $100,000 per acre, which would generate around $122,000 in additional annual tax revenue for the city. The actual market value of the affected properties, he estimated, could rise as high as $300,000 per acre if they were subdivided into smaller commercial lots with easy access to local infrastructure.
Charlie Pearce, the city manager, told councilors that having growth potential puts Ellsworth in a good financial position. Other development projects that already are planned, such as high-density housing projects off Eastward Lane and Beals Avenue, and a proposed new hotel off Downeast Highway, will add to the city’s tax base.
“A lot of rural parts of America are not in a growth pattern like this,” Pearce said. “The only way they’re going to keep their services going is through [higher] taxation.”
