Penobscot
Landing
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Snowe Backs Brewer Project  The briefing was part of U.S. Sen. Olympia Snowe’s visit to Brewer. Her visit
began with a briefing at City Hall, continued with a walk along the waterfront
— from City Hall to a scenic spot on the riverbank, behind the Harborside
Restaurant — and wrapped up with a “windshield tour” of other parts of the
target area, the strip of land that runs along the Penobscot River from just
north of the Penobscot River Bridge southward to the Orrington line.
Sachs, who left a position as the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s chief of program outreach to accept the Brewer post in 1999, worked as a legislative intern in then U.S. Rep. Snowe’s Auburn office in 1989 and 1990, while he was a student at Bates College in Lewiston. Among the attractions proposed for Penobscot Landing are an entertainment and niche retail district, a marina and a car-top boat launch, a children’s garden, a public market and artisan cooperative, a boat-building demonstration site and a small performing arts center, Sachs and other city leaders told Snowe. Running the entire length of the waterfront would be a recreational path for pedestrians and bicyclists, Sachs said. The path would occasionally turn into a boardwalk and in many places lead back into the city. While here, Snowe pledged her support for the project, now in the early stages of marketing and implementation. She said that she and fellow Sen. Susan Collins had earmarked $1.75 million for Brewer’s waterfront project in the Senate version of the federal budget for the coming fiscal year, which begins Oct. 1. The bulk of that total, $1 million, is in the federal transportation budget, she said. The rest is in the Senate’s Housing and Urban Development-Veterans Administration budget proposal. Snowe praised Brewer’s riverfront revival strategy as a sound plan aimed at making use of a key natural resource. The fact the Brewer plan was designed to support Bangor’s waterfront efforts and that community leaders had gone to great lengths to involve and enlist support from every sector of the local population also earned Brewer high marks from Snowe. “You really do have a jewel here … You’ve done an outstanding job,” she said. “It’s a remarkable plan. It’s a magnificent layout and does real credit to the community.” Others on hand for the briefing were City Manager Stephen Bost, Mayor Michael Celli, City Councilor Manley DeBeck Jr., and Michael Legasse, president of the Brewer Economic Development Corp. Sachs said that if the federal funding comes through, it will be used to stabilize Brewer’s rapidly eroding shoreline. “We have a significant erosion problem,” Sachs noted during the briefing. Due to tides and currents that are worse on the Brewer side of the river than on the Bangor side, valuable waterfront land is eroding at a rate of several feet a year in some spots. Erosion is a problem that must be addressed before the community can move on to other aspects of the redevelopment project, which is expected to require $34 million to $54 million in public and private investment over the next 10 to 12 years. Sachs said the $1.75 million Snowe and Collins are working to obtain for Brewer, along with up to $1 million the city hopes to acquire if the state’s next transportation bond issue is approved, will go a long way toward covering the erosion tab, estimated between $2 million and $5 million, depending on the repair method chosen. James Parker of Civil Engineering Services Inc. of Brewer, one of a team of firms the city hired to put together its redevelopment plan, said last fall that the part of the riverfront earmarked for the greatest change — the area around the three bridges between Brewer and Bangor — has about 4,500 linear feet of shoreline. Of that, approximately 4,000 feet needs to be stabilized, said Parker, also an avid boater. The exceptions, Parker said, are short sections reclaimed as part of bridge repair work and a stretch south of the Veterans Remembrance Bridge. Much of the timber cribbing that once ran along most of Brewer’s waterfront during the region’s lumbering and shipbuilding days has been washed out by ice and water. What remains is rotting, having gone without maintenance for 75 to 100 years, Parker said. According to Parker, the city has three options for shoring up its shoreline. It could install a barrier of stone riprap at an estimated cost of $600 per linear foot, which Parker suggested might not be suited to spots earmarked for boat access, or it could build new timber cribbing or metal sheet piling at a cost of between $1,200 and $1,400 a running foot. This is a copyright article written by Dawn Gagnon of the NEWS Staff that appeared in the Bangor Daily News, Wednesday, August 8, 2001. Bangor Daily News photo by Michael York, Copyright Material Wednesday, August 8, 2001. |
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The
City of Brewer