Boothbay Select Board renews liquor licenses, hears lake and library requests

[0:00] Select Board chair/presiding officer: Okay, first item on the agenda is the Pledge of Allegiance. The [0:06] John Morris, Knickerbocker Lake Association representative: Pledge of Allegiance is to the flag of the United States of America [0:09] Select Board chair/presiding officer: and to the republic for which it stands, one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. Okay, first item on the agenda tonight is public hearing. Coastal Maine Botanical Gardens applicant for renewal of liquor license Class A restaurant at Map Arrow 409 located at 132 Botanical Gardens Drive, Booth Bay, Maine. [0:42] Select Board member (Dan?): There's no outstanding notice of violations and this is a non-profit and it's a straight point. Motion to approve. Seconded. [0:54] Select Board chair/presiding officer: Motion's been approved and seconded. Any comments or questions? All here are none. motion passes. All in favor. Item 2, public hearing, Boothbay Craft Brewery. Just what I need. Boothbay Craft Brewery Inc. Applicants Edward Jr. and Laurie Mitchell, Matt Arrow, 6, lot 009, located at 301 Adams Palm Road, Boothbay, Maine. For renewal of a Class A restaurant liquor license. Lori Mitchell. [1:43] Select Board member (Dan?): Dan? No notice of violations. All taxes are paid. Motion approved. [1:49] Select Board chair/presiding officer: Seconded. Motion's been approved and seconded. Any comments or questions? Nope. Motion approved. Public comment? Nobody? Okay. No minutes to approve. [2:14] Select Board member (Dan?): Reports, Dan? Nothing really significant. Again, I'm still waiting to hear from Crooker about country club, finishing country club, and then moving on to Pleasant View. Pleasant Cove. Pleasant Cove. I was thinking of my name, but it kind of confused me. So, unfortunately, I don't have anything. Okay. Unless you guys have any questions. Anybody else? Anything on the sidewalk project? [2:46] Speaker D (unidentified): I saw something on the newspaper. [2:49] Select Board member (Dan?): There's actually a piece in here. [2:50] Speaker D (unidentified): Okay, I'm sorry. I don't have the agenda. [2:52] Select Board member (Dan?): Yeah, no, that's fine. That's fine. It's an agreement that the town needs from the select committee. [3:00] Select Board chair/presiding officer: Is that it for reports, Dan? That's it for me. Okay, there's no old business, new business. Christina Ford, library trustee, invitation for a library tour. [3:15] Select Board member (Dan?): Now, this is a flash from the past. [3:19] Christina Ford, Boothbay Harbor Memorial Library Trustee: oh you beat me to it thank you Dan for putting me on the agenda I'm Christina Ford I'm the newest member of the Board of Trustees for the Boothbay Harbor Memorial Library which serves both Boothbay Harbor most of you know me of course for my years on the Planning Board and the Board of Selectmen the last time I met with you formally was back in 2020 which was my last meeting as a selectman. I mention that because the night was memorable. We had our meeting, I'd say it was in June, although that's my memory, and recounted events that we'd done together in the last three years. It was a very sweet meeting. We were in a great mood of accomplishment. At the end, we adjourned, and everybody left, and I was lingering to have one last word with Dan and Stevie coming back in bursting that there was a horizon to horizon rainbow over the town. Do you remember that? It lasted a long time and I remember thinking what a hopeful event it was for facing the future. Right now there are three of you who were there. When Chuck Shuffler here, he was here too. But what I thought, I wasn't wrong about how it was hopeful. I mean, Richard and I have been gone for a while, and when we came back, I've actually been dazzled by what Booth Bay has done. And it has been your leadership that you have made it be something that people admire for what a community can do. Your support of the Botanical Garden, the Opera House, the Roundabout, Everything has been, it's really extraordinary to see it to come back like this. And I'm here today because I have, I'm going to ask you to consider supporting another great Boothbay Region project, which is the Memorial Library. And I wonder, have any of you visited the library recently? [5:27] Select Board member (Dan?): I've been there a few times a year, but I can't say that I've been there recently. [5:30] Christina Ford, Boothbay Harbor Memorial Library Trustee: Yeah, and me either. I don't go there often, mostly because being Richard's a writer, I'm a writer, we order books and reread them. I don't much go there, but you may know about the town's capital campaign, which is called the Next 100 Capital Campaign, and I brought you a brochure to read. I like that the cleverest title because tells you the library has been there for a hundred years, which is astonishing. I won't be coy. I'm going to be back to ask you for financial support, but I'm not doing it today. Today I'm just asking that the selectmen as a group, not individually, but as a group, that you go and visit it. They have one of the first things I learned as a trustee, I asked, what do you what do you all do when you show somebody, give somebody a tour of the library and I was actually dazzled by all that they did and so I'm asking if you all tonight would choose a day when all of you can come and I'd like it to be sometime before the 15th of October because I'd like you to come there when it's still warm so much of that property is not heated so it'd be nice to see it and I Dan told me that we need he Needs two weeks. This has to be a public notice because if all five of you come it'll be a public meeting, other people can come, and so I just am asking you tonight to figure out if you can think of a good day to come. I brought you copies of the brochure and I wanted to close this. You'll appreciate this, Bruce, I'm a city planner. City planners can rarely explain things in less than 3,000 words, you know. What's the purpose of a comprehensive plan, I mean, but the mission of the library I want to read to you is to create a welcoming space in which to explore ideas, foster community, and nurture individual growth through open access to the tools to learn, dream, connect, and do. Now I like that and that's in that little brochure that I gave to you and I admire how succinct it is. I'm writing a book about my own profession, this is going to be my model, okay. Did it have any questions for me? But I certainly would consider it. Yeah, I would love [7:55] Select Board chair/presiding officer: to take the door, so okay, thank you. Just have to get our heads together, figure a way, yeah. [8:00] Select Board member (Dan?): I can have the first and hate notified, but if we broke it up into two at a time we would not require those, but I can do it. [8:16] Christina Ford, Boothbay Harbor Memorial Library Trustee: If you can get it, the way I'd like to do it is because I want all of you to see the same thing and I'm afraid if I break you up that you don't see the same thing, but talk to me about it because I don't care, I care that you all come and it doesn't have to be at once, Dan. [8:36] Select Board member (Dan?): But that's just, we're flexible. [8:39] Christina Ford, Boothbay Harbor Memorial Library Trustee: Yeah, okay, all right, thank you, thank you, and nice to see y'all. Next on [8:51] Select Board chair/presiding officer: the agenda, when Mitchell Knickerbocker pond concept, when, yeah, well, [9:00] John Morris, Knickerbocker Lake Association representative: thanks for taking a few minutes to listen to what I've been up to. I would like to introduce John Morris, who is actually here to represent the Knickerbocker Lake Association. That association's been around for quite a few years, I think since the late 80s, and it's kind of been reinvigorated in the last few years with some new board members, one I kind of know personally. Lori's the president. She's kind of running that. I am not affiliated with the association, but I sit in on the board's meetings that they do just once a year. And last fall, about this time, we had a meeting, a gathering for their annual meeting, and the topic of the level of Knickerbocker came up again because last year was a very dry year as well. And so we all ended up at one of the trustees' meetings not that long after just to inquire with them what their thoughts were and the history of it, which I knew very little of. And in that meeting, it came up that one of the things was that a beaver dam and may have been taken out of there, and that was causing issues on the Bardo's Island culvert sometime a while ago. It was before I owned property there. I bought my property at the north end in 2019. So I only have experience of the lake levels for about seven years. And there's been a majority of those years that I've resided there that I have noticed significant loss of water during the summer times. But there's been a few years that it hasn't been as drastic because there have been wet summers. But after that, and Jerry mentioned, Jerry Gammage, one of the trustees, had mentioned that, oh, it sounds like you need another beaver, you know, but it really isn't, because I guess they trapped the beaver out at some point because of the nuisance it was causing. And so that got me to thinking, and I just started watching the lake and watched it recharge through the winter and all the snow and the rains that we've had. And it did reach what I would consider the high tide mark that's clearly on the shoreline, you know, at the wettest part of the year. In April, March, April, when we've gotten all the snows and the melt, it raises up. Then I went down to the culvert and saw just, you know, a full culvert running out. And it happened to be, I think it was the first part of May, when John Owen from the Water District goes and starts monitoring that outflow along with other things he does. And I got to talk to him and ask him that they do historical measurements of that and how much flow goes through and how many gallons per day is the average. And it's a significant amount of water. And that culvert is, and when that was running through at the height, and I think we did have a rain event just before his measurement, so it was a really pretty high measurement. It was like 11 million gallons a day was running through that culvert. The typical average if you looked at all those and I didn't bring them today because we're not really talking about that specific stuff is like four or five million gallons a day during the spring. That's a three foot culvert and at that time it was pretty much the top of the culvert. It was about at the high tide mark, it wasn't the lake wasn't higher than it could have been. So what's happening in my observation and just watching it all spring was that it's losing three feet of water because We're letting it go way before the water district even considers to draft any. When they started drafting around July 15th this year, that water level is at the bottom of the culvert, mainly because we hadn't had any rain, but we let it all go. Up, and so I get to thinking, what would it take to, and is it possible to do something to retain that three feet of water that we're losing before we need it? And so I made some calls, just called the different, I went and saw Weston at the water district and asked him, and he ran it by Rebecca, and we just, I just started talking to each agency that I thought would be involved. And if we did any kind of retention there, it would require not a big retention. I want to, I'm resisting there to say damn because I don't think that's the right word, but it would essentially be trying to keep that, keep that water from going below that top of that cover, because that's, that's really the high tide mark. And so I call it, we would have to do something about fish passage, because l wives and the American eel all run through the fishway at West Harbor Pond and make it all the way up through there. There are definitely juvenile alewives in there. I've seen them. And so that is part of that whole estuary. So we would need to talk to DMR. So I called Mike Brown, who I used to work with years ago. He's actually the head of the Sea Run Fisheries Department at DMR. Ran the idea by, you know, what do you think about that? And he was excited, generally excited, about the idea that somebody cared that we made sure that fish still made it all the way up. And I'll get into that in a minute about what DMR is focusing on now with Sea Run Fisheries compared to in the past. So he said, well, that would probably be a DEP thing too. We would have to work with them. I called the DEP guy and he goes, the biggest hurdle isn't that you can't do it. The biggest hurdle is the stakeholders. All the people that own property around, you've got to make sure that they aren't adversely affected by retaining more water, which I don't believe anybody will be. And then you've got to make sure we have the blessing of the water district. And it's not their purview, but they're definitely a stakeholder. You guys have a huge stake because you have a lot of property there and access to it and the gardens. So I said, all right, I'll start talking to the stakeholders and see what everybody thinks. So I've worked my way around, talked to the gardens about it. The other idea I had was because potentially the gardens might be doing an expansion of water and sewer, not that 's guaranteed, that culvert would be affected, would be taken out maybe more than once, depending on if that happens. And that's just a possibility. I thought, well, it might take long enough to, we could, you know, do the project together, thinking we wouldn't have to mobilize things if you did, had, got permission to do something, you'd be able to do it at that time. So I met with the gardens. Kareb Arnold is his name. He's kind of been following closely with the infrastructure thing. Nothing guaranteed there, but they are working. The engineering has been done. I talked to, as I said, I talked to DMR, talked to DP, talked to the water district. When we had our annual Knickerbocker Lake Associates meeting again, I actually put together a presentation about my thoughts about it and ran it by them, and they decided to vote to go forward to see if we could put a working group together to see if it's feasible, see if it makes sense. And I guess the way I'd like to put it is it isn't that we can't do it. We know we can do it. The question is, should we do it? And we need to bring all the agencies that would require running it by together and talk about it, see if it's something that makes sense. An example would be Adams Pond. If we didn't have a dam at the north end of Adams Pond, we wouldn't have Adams Pond. And almost every other freshwater body that we have on the peninsula has been man-made or at least retained more, Southport, Appalachia, all of them. And you can go all over the state and see if we didn't have these impoundments. There's a lot of places that wouldn't have the water resource. And at NACWAS, it's another one. So I don't think it's anything out of the norm. I think it's just the beaver was doing it for a while, and probably in history it was doing it way more than it did in the last 20, 30 years. So I think it's something we should look into. You guys being the town is a huge stakeholder. And I'd like to see if we could put together a work group with somebody from each one of those agencies to sit down and stakeholders. And that's why I'm here today. See if you guys would be interested in supporting it and assigning somebody that would meet once in a while and see if we can figure it out. That's it. I [17:17] Select Board chair/presiding officer: Think it's a good idea. Yeah, I agree. But I, if that's what it comes down to, I wouldn't oppose it. I'm just saying I'm not opposed to it. If we need somebody, I'd be willing to. [17:43] John Morris, Knickerbocker Lake Association representative: I have reached out. I've talked to Mike Brown a few times from DMR. Something to think about that makes it sound easier, because when you first think about damming up something, it's like, oh my god, can you imagine the regulations of the permits you would need to do that? But if we focused on the fishery side of it, Mike Brown is, what DMR is doing now for the LY fishery especially, but even eels, is that they're no longer focusing on the big runs, like the commercial runs of Nequasset or Damascotta. Mills or the other ones down east. Those are pretty well taken care of. And what they've found is that if they start taking care of the small runs, even though West Harbor will probably never be a commercial LY of harvesting run ever again, it is cumulative. It is those fish add to the health of that fishery. And it also adds to the health of the lakes. The adults run up in the spring when the water's high. They can easily get up through there now. They spawn, and within a few weeks they do a run back, which is the adults leave, and the juveniles, the babies stay in there and grow up, feed all the other fish that are in there and all the birds. And they also eat plankton. They're eating that, which helps remove phosphorus from the lake. And then if there's water in the fall for them to run out in the fall, they leave in the fall. So the bad part about this, at least on a dry year like this, is it's been run down below the cover level. And so those juveniles more than likely aren't going to leave this fall. And they may not leave until next year, if at all. So it would be better for the fish to do that. So they find that instead of putting all their eggs in one basket for the LOI fishery, they're starting to support these little runs. And there's even one on the river road I think they've done. They've done little small runs that they're helping, and those fish don't necessarily go back to the exact place like a salmon. They will get into a school of others and end up finding themselves in another lake, so it is beneficial for the fishery. So if we go out with that angle, instead of looking at it, we want to raise the level of the lake three feet so we can capture that water for our use, which is a big deal for our peninsula. If we look at it from the fishery side of it, we might be, well, one, DMR will be the lead agency, and then they'll be dealing with DEP, and it's interstate agencies, a lot easier to be done, and it wouldn't require any of us to do a lot of it. So that's my thought about that. [20:15] Select Board chair/presiding officer: What it has to do with sea-run fish and stuff like that, is there any grants available? There may be. [20:21] John Morris, Knickerbocker Lake Association representative: I've mentioned it a little bit to Wes, and he was interested in, hey, he says, is we used to try to talk to the water district about maybe trying to get a fishway into Adams Pond, but they always got shot down because they didn't want to lose that water, which I get. But there's potentially something we can do there. And he says, if we can work something out on both, we might be able to fund both, or at least partially fund both. So they used to stock Adams Pond and let them have the juveniles and run out, good for the lake, but then there was no way for them to get back in. You don't have to let water run year-round out of a pond for white fishery to be viable. I mean Danvers Scotto Mills isn't running out so it's mainly making sure you got water going out in the spring and hopefully some in the fall. Yeah and if we can retain this even if we have to manage it in the fall and pull a pen board or something and let the water run we're gonna capture it back in the fall or in the winter in the spring it's this summer and you can look at it 's been dry but it is it's taken some pressure you might get some this weekend yeah it's not in my in my look my view of it and there's others around the lake that have a different view about the drawdown of the water from knickerbocker by the district i feel that yes they draw it down but i feel like it's especially this year it was already gone before they started drawing so if we could have captured that even just 50 million gallons not the millions of gallons or lose I think I figured it out was a quarter of a billion gallons of water we lost before July 15th a lot of water that we just let go and it's you know for the benefit of the town and the resource and the health of the lake and the health of the fishery I think it's a win all the way around I don't I can't find anybody that thinks it's a bad idea I did have some concern [22:23] Select Board chair/presiding officer: three feet of rise and it doesn't bother anybody around the lake yeah I mean [22:32] John Morris, Knickerbocker Lake Association representative: That's it, that's it. We're not trying to increase the level, although I did play around with it. Yeah, I did play around with the transit and went out and shot some levels and saw where the, where the first cottage, will say it's a camp on this side, would be adversely impacted. It was like six feet above where, you know, six feet. So you could add three feet to it and not adversely impact anybody. I don't think that's what necessarily would be the goal, but right, certainly captured the three that were losing. Yeah, that's all I got. [23:07] Speaker D (unidentified): Thanks, William. Julie. Thank you. Our past president, Nick, about the lake association, and, you know, I was coming, I'm here to support what he says totally. If you all get a chance to go by, you should take a look at the lake. I've lived on it since 2012. I've never seen it this low. And it's not healthy. I mean, there's a lot of vegetation. We need to change something or we are going to have a water problem here. And this solution just sounds like there could be money behind it. It sounds like it might not take forever to do. And so I would just urge expediency in this matter. [23:44] John Morris, Knickerbocker Lake Association representative: And I will say, going around the state, and we just came back from Bar Harbor today, all of those lakes down there, well, it's dry. And it's just exacerbated, you know, if we could have captured that water. And the concern did arise. We had a few people, I think we had one person come from the West Harbor Pond Association and listen in on what I was presenting and his concerns. Well, what about us? And absolutely. Absolutely, but I think this might be beneficial for them, too, because the fisheries, if we can make it healthy and get a fall runoff of the juveniles, that's going to have West Harbor, too. They're not going to have any less water because we're just all letting it go to the harbor before June is the problem. All right, that's all I've got. Thank you. Thanks, William. [24:39] Select Board chair/presiding officer: Next on the agenda, a sidewalk project request. [24:43] Select Board member (Dan?): West. Yeah, so this is kind of a boilerplate piece that comes up when the state is going to work on a project and they are going to have equipment that potentially is heavier than your roads are rated for. I think this came up on 27. Why? I don't know, because it didn't really, I think they may have had to use side roads to stage some of it. Okay, the only real section that the town will be, this small portion of that river. But that's a good point. [25:17] Select Board chair/presiding officer: Thank you, Dan. That's not even a mistake. That's actually fitting, Dan. [25:24] Select Board member (Dan?): That's perfect. So, you know, they just weren't worrying about their own liability. [25:33] Select Board chair/presiding officer: So the request is just basically a working easement to be able to work on our property with their equipment, correct? Can we put an attachment in that the roundabout has to be done before? So what do you mean you need a motion from us too? Yes, I'll obtain a motion here. [25:58] Select Board member (Dan?): Yeah, I'll make the motion to give the state an easement I guess. Well, just to sign up, to sign. [26:05] Select Board chair/presiding officer: yeah it's either a second motion has been made in second in any comments or questions all those approve you got it passes and we have a second public comment anybody okay I'll entertain a motion to review the warrants and sign I'm too busy going on with the second one. I want to obtain a motion to adjourn. So moved. Second. Done. That state one, do we have a... [27:10] Speaker D (unidentified): That's in the move order. Okay.