HALLOWELL — The City Council will hold a public meeting Monday to discuss the city’s plan to move the historic Dummer House in order to construct a new parking lot in time for the start of next year’s Water Street reconstruction work.
The council will review the Memorandum of Understanding between the city and the Dummer House’s owner, Linda Bean, and the public will have the opportunity to weigh-in with its thoughts on the proposal.
According to the agreement, Linda Bean, the granddaughter of L.L. Bean’s founder and the owner of the Dummer House and adjacent land bordered by Second and Central streets, has agreed to move the historic house and sell the remaining property to Hallowell. Bean and the city have agreed on a $147,000 price for the remaining parcels of land.
Bean will continue to own the house when it moves to its new location — on the corner of Second and Central streets — and Preservation Timber Framing in Berwick will handle the move and rehabilitation of the historic building.
The transfer of ownership of the Dr. Hubbard Museum from the city to Bean is new to the proposal. City Manager Nate Rudy said Bean wants to have that building, in addition to the Dummer House, so that the two buildings can become a more substantial venue for a collection of antiques and historic Hallowell and Hubbard artifacts.
Rudy said the city’s main goal is to make sure the project gets completed in time to build a parking lot on the Dummer House’s lot. The lack of ample parking on and near downtown Hallowell has been something residents and business owners have lamented for years, and Rudy said a 30-space gravel lot is all the city could afford. The work will be funded using the $300,000 voters approved in April as part of a $2.36 million bond package.
“(We want) to also make sure the Dr. Hubbard Museum is maintained at or better than the condition the city has kept it,” Rudy said. “We want to honor Dr. Hubbard’s memory and legacy, and we feel with this partnership that will get done.”
Rudy said Bean wanted the Hubbard building to be included in the deal, and he said the city doesn’t have a strong or compelling reason to keep it if Bean can maintain it at the same or better level.
“It’s up to (Linda Bean) how she wants to administer that, and the city is not being prescriptive about how it gets done so long as it gets done to the standard that we have done it,” he said. “There’s more space, and it’s easier to plan that footprint if the buildings are together as a unit for historic preservation and museum space,” Rudy said.
Rudy said even though the finer points of the deal have not been worked out, the project can still be done by April, when the Maine Department of Transportation begins a six-month reconstruction of a 2,000-foot stretch of Water Street in Hallowell’s busy downtown.
“Once the purchase-and-sale agreement is executed, the deeds are registered and everything else gets done, we can have earthwork, earthmoving and grading done,” Rudy said.
In other business, the council will:
• discuss a proposal from Rudy to invest the Cemetery Trust fund into a portfolio that will generate a 4-5% return, roughly $40,000-50,000 per year. Rudy proposes that these funds be used to hire a full time, year-round public works employee to manage cemetery and building maintenance, and supplemental winter storm response and snow removal with an emphasis on downtown sidewalk snow removal and non-CDL driver support for snow plowing operations;
• receive an update from Code Enforcement Officer Doug Ide on several distressed and concerning properties;
• hear the second and third readings of a proposed parking ordinance change that would permanently eliminate two parking spaces on Central Street on the southwest corner of Second and Central streets, and to shorten two spots on the southeast corner for “Compact Vehicle Only” parking, to improve visibility in that intersection;
• continue a discussion on recreational marijuana legalization and what Hallowell’s Marijuana Task Force recommends for licensing and permitting of commercial, adult-use cannabis cultivation, manufacturing, and retail.
The council meets at 6 p.m. Monday at City Hall.
Jason Pafundi — 621-5663
Twitter: @jasonpafundiKJ
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