Selling the plan to the people

The city battles to mesh what Portland needs with what Portland wants in building Ocean Gate

By Noah Bruce

It may come as no surprise that a project dubbed Ocean Gate (official name: Ocean Gateway Marine Terminal Project) is embroiled in controversy, and right now there’s no hotter, or more critical, local public issue in Portland than how the city decides to develop its waterfront. The intensity of the public’s interest in the decision was evidenced by the standing-room only audience in attendance for the City Council’s workshop on the matter, held April 11.

The bulk of the controversy surrounds the Scotia Prince, an international ferry that travels between Maine and Nova Scotia, currently docked at the city’s International Marine Terminal (IMT), which is also home to the container industry: the launching point for the export of Maine goods like shoes, paper, lumber, and textiles. Add to the equation cruise ships small enough to fit on the IMT (the larger ones use the BIW dock or use smaller boats to transport passengers to land), and you’ve got one very busy pier. According to Jack Humeniuk, Portland representative for the International Longshoremen’s Association, “the conflicts in berthing between the three are becoming unmanageable . . . It doesn’t work, it’s too crowded, it’s too dangerous, and it’s too difficult for the city to benefit from the value of the port.”

Crowding is so bad, says Portland’s director of waterfront operations, Ben Snowe, that twice this April, the city has had to ask the Prince to temporarily leave its home so a commercial boat would have room to dock, and it will have to continue asking for this favor until the ferry is moved.

The Scotia Prince needs to be moved to ease these logistical problems and to separate the commercial and passenger industries, allowing the container business to expand and saving the cruise ships’ passengers from a nasty first glimpse of Portland (“And on your right you’ll see Portland’s famous freight crane . . .”).

To this end, the city has been studying the issue since 1998. In the spring of that year, it commissioned the “CAP” (Cargo and Passenger) study which recommended moving the Scotia Prince and the cruise ship operation from its current location near the old million dollar bridge to the waterfront on the East End, which will be vacated by Bath Iron Works (BIW) in December of 2001. In the fall of 1998, another city-sponsored study group called Waterfront Task Force One endorsed the CAP study’s recommendations and the city began to plan for the move. In the fall of 1999, the citizens of Maine passed the Transportation Bond Bill which earmarked nearly $9 million specifically for Ocean Gate.

Despite the necessity of moving the Scotia Prince, and the time and energy spent making the decision, many citizens are still worried about relocating the ferry in the East End. And with good reason.

The Scotia Prince operation consists not only of the luxury ferry boat, but also a parking area (the necessary size of which is up for debate) and even worse, a cumbersome, barbed-wire enclosed US customs operation (to prevent ferry passengers from importing ganja or hoof and mouth disease into the US) that will create huge lines of cars awaiting inspection.

Needless to say, many citizens, especially East End and Peaks Island residents, fear Ocean Gate will end up a monster: ugly to look at, consuming vast tracts of valuable waterfront property, blocking public access to the water, and creating a traffic problem to boot. Nini McManamy, a resident of the East End who has been involved in the planning process, notes that “the city finds itself too far down the track without enough citizen input.”

These citizens, calling for a study of alternative sites for the Scotia Prince, won a victory Wednesday night at the City Council workshop when, after three hours of discussion (the term is used generously), most council members said they endorsed looking at alternative sites to ensure public trust in the process, even though they also vocalized their doubts that another satisfactory site would be found.

“I think it’s critical to the process that everybody believes we looked at every chance we had to avoid a problem, so I’m going to agree with Councilor [Peter] O’Donnell, [who proposed the study of alternative sites],” said Councilor James Cloutier. “That said, I don’t think we’re going to find anything that’s going to work.”

Councilor Cloutier is most likely correct. The proposed alternatives are weak, and barring the emergence of a surprise option, Ocean Gate will remain in the East End.

Once the city proves that the East End is the spot, it will have to deal with the trickier issue of what Ocean Gate will look like. The city has significant public comment from six community meetings and a city design workshop, or charrette — a brainstorming session where participants draw their vision for a project — all held this winter. According to Mayor Cheryl Leeman, the city now must convice the public that it will incorporate public sentiment into its plans.

“In all my years of public service,” says Leeman, “I’ve never seen a more public process. The downfall of this project is that we have not gone back to the public and explained how we’ve used what they’ve given us.”

At the Council workshop on Wednesday, Councilor Tom Kane echoed Leeman’s critique of the process. “I think the public perception, true or not,” he said, “is that the charrette was a charade. There’s nothing worse than saying to the public ‘What do you think?’ and then not listening.”

Clearly public trust is critical to Ocean Gate’s success. Without it, warns Councilor Karen Geraghty, the project, like the debate between the city and the Citizens for a Comprehensive Plan, could turn nasty. “The most important thing,” says Geraghty, “is that the public has to believe in the process . . . I want to get to a place where everybody feels we have something we can live with, otherwise, we’ll have another referendum on our hands.”

BIW SITE: the city has budgeted money to upgrade this dock for Ocean Gate.

As with the May 1 referendum proposed by the Citizens for a Comprehensive Plan – a group calling for a greater voice for citizens in the city’s development process and using a citywide moratorium on large development to get it — the question of citizen participation is central to the Ocean Gate decision.

The vote on the statewide bond notwithstanding, the role of citizens in Ocean Gate truly began in the summer of 2000 with the creation of Waterfront Task Force III, a body with two arms: the facilities committee and the master planning committee. The former is a group of eight members, chaired by Councilor Jay Hibbard and comprised of major players in the project including representatives from Casco Bay Lines (which currently shares the Maine State Pier with BIW), cruise ship companies, and the Scotia Prince. The facilities committee’s job is to create the design for Ocean Gate. The latter is chaired by Councilors Geraghty and O’Donnell and has 30 members, representing a variety of interests, from residents of the East End and Peaks Island to maritime industry workers to the owners of the land that abuts city-owned waterfront land. Its job is to study the entire waterfront, not just the East End, and, in particular, to look at the way Ocean Gate would affect surrounding neighborhoods including Munjoy Hill, India Street, and the Old Port.

Designed to work closely together, it’s perhaps not surprising that the more streamlined, narrowly focused facilities committee quickly pulled ahead of the larger planning committee. “They are way ahead of us,” says Geraghty. Not only did the master planning committee have a larger task at hand, but, as Humeniuk says, “it’s got about every interest you could think of.”

While the facilities committee had already recommended upgrades to the marine portions of the BIW site, and had begun considering plans for the land portion of Ocean Gate, the master planning committee was stuck talking about whether the Prince should be moved to the East End in the first place.

Some in the planning committee, mostly Munjoy Hill and Peaks Island residents, believed the city had not sufficiently explored alternatives to the East End plan. The demand for a study of alternatives started small but grew meeting by meeting. “Maybe three people were saying it at the first meeting, then there were five at the next,” says Geraghty. The idea truly gained a full head of steam when city architect Alan Holt held what he calls a city design workshop, or charrette, where members of the community were invited to brainstorm ideas for a project and come up with drawings depicting how they would like the project to turn out.

One hundred and seventy six people showed up for the Ocean Gate workshop this past January. They were divided into 16 teams and instructed to think “outside the box” in creating a vision for the East End. Eight of the teams traveled so far outside the box as to leave the Scotia Prince outside their vision entirely, though it was in their instructions to include it.

Councilor O’ Donnell went to bat for these citizens at the City Council workshop Wednesday night when he told his fellow councilors he “would not attend another waterfront master planning committee meeting until this council places the Scotia Prince on its agenda.” By the end of the meeting, the majority of councilors agreed to study alternatives to the East End.

Some, like Humeniuk, feel the city has already done the job of looking at alternative sites. “[Ocean Gate] is being portrayed as being planned oh-so-quickly, but the fact is this has been talked about for three-and-a-half years, and the city has looked at the alternatives.”

The problem is that some Portlanders feel the city decided to place the Scotia Prince in the East End without citizen consensus and only began taking citizen input in earnest after this crucial decision was made. “In the charrette,” says Phineas Sprague, an owner of some of the land that abuts the public property on the East End “half the groups said ‘Let’s accept the cruise ships but not the Scotia Prince .’ Now the city had a problem because the public had said ‘no’ to its plan to relocate the Prince to the East End.”

According to Councilor Geraghty, the public was given something of an opportunity to speak out on the issue during the original Waterfront Task Force in 1998. Unlike Waterfront Task Force Three, this group did not include any citizens who were not major stakeholders in the project on its board, but it did hold six public meetings. Geraghty theorizes that protests against the East End plan did not begin then because “at that time there were not a lot of details to discuss . . . What we were told [by citizens] is whatever you do, you must take care of the Peaks Islander parking and you cannot totally disrupt Munjoy Hill.” As residents began to have a clearer idea of what moving the Scotia Prince would entail, the cry to look at alternatives grew.

Portland’s director of transportation, Jeff Munroe, told the council on Wednesday that the city has studied at least one alternative — leaving the Scotia Prince where it is and moving the container business west of the million dollar bridge. The problem with this plan, said Munroe, is that it is too expensive. First of all, the land to the west of the bridge would have to be purchased from Northern Utilities and Guilford (the contentious company that has prevented Amtrak service to Portland for over a decade). Other expenses include moving the container business, fixing up the Scotia Prince facility that is currently in bad shape, and liability for locating the container business on a site that is potentially contaminated by industrial pollutants. Add to this the fact that the city would have to pay to operate four docks instead of three — the fish pier; the IMT; the hypothetical west-of-the-bridge pier; and the BIW site, which would continue to house the cruise ships that don’t fit at the IMT.

The other alternative, proposed by councilor O’Donnell at the meeting is Deake’s Wharf, located to the east of the IMT. Unfortunately, this suggestion is absurd. In an interview with the Phoenix, Portland’s director of waterfront operations, Ben Snowe, described the Wharf as “the size of a postage stamp.” Indeed the property, which does not belong to the city in the first place, isn’t big enough to house a decent-sized pizza shop, let alone a full-on customs facility complete with queuing area (for the cars waiting to be inspected) and parking garage.

Barring an unforeseen alternative location, the city will most likely decide to keep the Scotia Prince in the East End. But while a token study of the alternatives is a first step to instilling more trust in the process, the city must follow through in its efforts to both take citizen comment and report back how it has incorporated those suggestions.

EAST END: future home of a US customs operation?

At this time, the city has not adopted any plan for developing the land to be used for Ocean Gate. In its memo dated April 5, the facilities committee tables any action connected with the land components of Ocean Gate, “pending feedback for the City Council and master planning committee.”

Theoretically then, the process is wide open for the public’s input. In theory, the city should be able to accommodate the citizen’s main concerns and desires as expressed in the charrette and the public meetings: no flat parking lot and queuing area, no traffic problems, preservation of Peaks Islander parking, preservation of public access to the water, and creation of green spaces.

Working with the facilities committee, the consulting firm Woodard and Curran, developed an extravagant plan for Ocean Gate that did take into account many of the citizens’ concerns. For example, using a multi-level structure, it hid the queuing area and the parking from view. Though not officially endorsed, it shows that the committee is willing to consider public demands in its process.

The problem is, creative use of the space will cost serious money, and there is no debate that the city has only about $15 million in its coffers for the project. According to Frank Akers, one of the original developers of the Old Port back in the ’70s and a member of the master planning committee, this is not enough to even begin to develop the land, let alone get creative with the planning.

“This city has big taste buds but a meager pocketbook,” he says. “They haven’t got enough money for squat. They’ve got money from a bond issue to clean up what BIW’s going to leave them and a little left over to extend the piers.”

According to Geraghty, the docking charges levied on the cruise ships and the Prince will not offset the price of building a deluxe facility like the one designed by Woodard and Currant and taxpayers will be left holding the bag. “I think there’s no question,” she says, “that the operators — Casco Bay Lines, the cruise ships, and the Scotia Prince — cannot afford a $40 million facility. We don’t have that kind of money and they can’t afford the rents we would have to charge to pay for it.”

Councilor Cloutier, generally regarded as the council’s financial wizard, isn’t sure how the city plans to pay for Ocean Gate either. “You add up what we have for financial demands,” he says, “and I don’t see what chain of good fortune will allow us to make a significant capital investment in that facility. We need to focus strongly on the finance of this because people are going to expect that they don’t have to pick between parks and Ocean Gate or schools and Ocean Gate. The expectation is that this will be better managed that that.”

Cloutier also notes that Waterfront Task Force Two, an essentially financial study, recommended the creation of a Tax Increment Finance District (TIF) as one possible way to raise the cash, but that has yet to be voted on by the council.

The expense of building Ocean Gate, whether the city elects to build a bare-bones eyesore of a facility or something more palatable to residents, is compounded by the fact that both the cruise ship industry and the Scotia Prince are warm-weather-month operations in Portland, and thus are limited in their capacity to generate revenue for the city.

The glimmer of hope for a way out of this conundrum over what Portland wants versus what Portland can afford is “mixed-use” zoning, which would allow the development of housing and businesses in the area.

The benefit of changing the zoning is twofold. First, taxes generated from new homes and businesses could help provide the funding necessary to design a thoughtfully planned, well-executed project that takes into account the needs of both residents and industry.

Second, while some loathe the thought of allowing coffee shops and bars around the waterfront, a majority of Portland residents who participated in the city’s workshop and meetings like the idea. Sixty-eight percent of the groups that participated in the neighborhood forums listed mixed-use developments as something they would like to see. Similarly, of the 16 groups that participated in the charrette, 13 included mixed-use development in their drawings. Some of the drawings extended existing streets, like Hancock and India Street, to literally create more city blocks (the charrettes are on display at the Portland Public Library and online at www.portland citizen.org).

Currently, the East End waterfront is zoned strictly for maritime use, dating to 1987, when Portlanders voted to preserve their working waterfront at a time when other port cities were converting their waterfronts to condos and malls.

The working waterfront has deep historical roots in Portland and any zoning change that would encroach upon it is a potentially fiery political issue. Phineas Sprague calls zoning “Portland’s third rail issue” and believes politicians are afraid to touch it.

In fact, 78 percent of the charrette participants included “loss of maritime use” as one of their nightmare scenarios for Ocean Gate. However, the city could preserve deep water zoning for the actual waterfront and allow mixed-use zoning in the areas further from the water.

Even Humeniuk, who as a union representative for the longshoremen represents a group that is very interested in maintaining Portland’s working waterfront, is open to discussing mixed-use development on the privately held land abutting the public land that is set back from the water. “I don’t think there should be restaurants and bars right along the waterfront,” he says. “I think the privately owned land, you should discuss that in terms of how it could help you support the working waterfront land.” In other words, taxes from mixed-use development could fuel Ocean Gate and the city’s other working docks.

The city’s challenge is the sheer number of strongly held opinions on what should be done with the waterfront on the East End. Councilor Geraghty says “there are not two sides to this issue there are thirty.”

Though it’s certainly not an easy puzzle to solve, “It’s a hell of an opportunity,” says Sprague. “What’s great about this decision,” explains Geraghty, “is that we get to be philosophical. We can decide what kind of city we want to be.”

Unfortunately, right now, “nobody trusts the system,” says Sprague. He believes that this lack of trust makes the parties involved in the decision unwilling to listen to each other for fear of losing ground. “Everybody’s got an agenda,” he says. “I would like to have an ongoing discussion about what’s best for Portland but I don’t think you can do that until you stop with the agendas.”

Noah Bruce can be reached at nbruce@phx.com.