Penobscot
Landing
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| UM Teams to Show Brewer Waterfront Plans
BREWER — Site plans for two key components of the city’s waterfront redevelopment plan — namely a marina and a boat-building museum — will be pitched during a mock planning board meeting from 5 to 8 p.m. Thursday at City Hall. Though the panel that’s been assembled to conduct the meeting isn’t the real Brewer Planning Board, the presentation panelists will hear University of Maine engineering students address some real-life matters in the community, Drew Sachs, the city’s economic development director, said Tuesday.As part of their capstone design course, 28 university seniors divided into five teams have been charged with developing alternative designs for Penobscot Landing, as Brewer’s waterfront now is known, based on the master redevelopment plan the City Council adopted in November. Among the attractions proposed for Penobscot Landing, which runs from just north of the Penobscot River Bridge south to the Orrington line, are a riverside recreational path, an entertainment and niche retail district, a marina and a boat launch, a children’s garden, a public market and artisan cooperative, museums, a boat-building demonstration site and a small performing arts center, among other things. While the master plan spells out proposed placements for waterfront attractions and features, as well as a timeline and cost estimates, it is still conceptual in nature, a document that will see fine-tuning as the plan is implemented. Over the course of the spring semester, the student teams looked at a variety of engineering and design issues as they pertain to Brewer’s waterfront. These issues included traffic and environmental impacts, cost estimates, designs for major structures, riverfront access, road and parking needs, water distribution and fire hydrant planning and which existing elements should be improved or redeveloped and which should be demolished, to name a few. Professor Dana Humphrey of the UM department of civil and environmental engineering said earlier that the capstone project is an annual requirement for civil and environmental engineering majors. The point is to arm the students with some of the work experience they’ll need as they venture into the job market this spring and summer, he said. As in a real design firm, the five teams have been working under tight deadlines and budget constraints, submitting monthly invoices as their work progressed. Thursday’s presentations, which will involve the same formal presentations and site plan review procedures to which working design firms are subject, are the culmination of the students’ semester long effort. Sachs said that the students’ alternatives could provide detailed, specific information that will prove useful to city staff, property owners, prospective developers and others involved in turning the city’s waterfront master plan into reality. This is a copyright article written by Dawn Gagnon of the NEWS Staff that appeared in the Bangor Daily News, Wednesday, May 2, 2001. |
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The
City of Brewer