Seven Siegel talks about the Gorham Connector
Every Month PelotonLabs founder Liz Trice interviews a community member for The West End News. This month Liz caught up with Seven Siegel (they/them), a Town Councilor in Gorham.
How did you get involved in this?
I have a master’s in public policy, and now that I live in this great community with my wife and four-month-old daughter, I want to give back. I joined the planning board first, then the Gorham town council, and now am running for state representative in District 109.
So far, the Maine Turnpike Authority has purchased 75% of the land it needs to build the new highway. How did we get here?
There’s a lot of moving parts and organizations. The Maine Turnpike Authority has talked with all of the towns and many other state agencies. This has been in the making for years, and we’re just now actually seeing it come more to fruition, where land is getting purchased. We’re five years away now rather than “someday.”
There’s two different parts that are important to discuss. First, as a country we’re addicted to highways. We love building them and expanding them, and every time they get full of traffic, we just build more, which if you follow the writing about planning, the result is “induced demand”: the more roads you build, the more people are going to drive. Every single time they expand a roadway, over time the traffic comes back, because of induced demand.
The other side of the conversation is, it’s better to have a highway on the outside of the town. When you look at other countries, they have highways away from their cities, but here we put highways through our cities. Right now, Gorham has Route 25 and Route 114, two state highways going through the center of town. If you want to get west of Gorham, you need to drive through town. MDOT’s goal is to get as many cars as possible through an area as smoothly as possible, but we want our downtown to be a place where people stop and pedestrians and businesses come to. Those goals are at odds with each other.
What is the MTA process?
There is public process and public input, and there will be public hearings. There is not, however, a vote at the council level saying “we agree to this happening” or not. The turnpike is going through private land, and the MTA is purchasing the land from private landowners. In Gorham, it’s primarily a closed golf course, so that’s pretty good. MTA is part of the executive branch, not legislative, so there are not elected officials involved except for the governor.
I hear some people are opposed. Also there are issues of wanting to have density but no sewer or water near the proposed location.
I see this as something that is happening, and we need to make the best of the situation. We can reduce demand in other ways. We can make Gorham’s downtown less car-friendly, and more pedestrian and business friendly, so it’s a walkable downtown. We’ve zoned the area around the turnpike to be very dense, with no single-family homes or minimum unit sizes, and are providing waivers to require less parking. There is no water or sewer, but we can add that at the same time they’re building the highway. With the population density we’re talking about, there will probably be a new food store there, and likely a new trail to walk or bike to the Gorham village.
What’s your vision for how we can build a Maine where you don’t have to get in your car to go anywhere?
What needs to happen at a state level, like in Oregon and Tennessee, is for the state to require towns to have a growth boundary that defines where you can build and where you can’t. That does a really good job of containing sprawl. However, one of the problems we run into is that farmers are land rich and cash poor and are only able to retire through selling their land to developers. So, if we want to stop sprawl, and if we want to keep farms, we need a real answer to that.
What would you recommend for other people who care about this issue or improving their community generally?
The head of the MTA is very open to talking to the public. He makes his cell phone number available.
It’s incredibly, incredibly, incredibly important for people to take an active role in their community. The most valuable thing people can do is attend and speak at public meetings and help your town’s council figure out how to have the best zoning so that new development is what you want. I think people underestimate what ten people at a meeting can do to change opinions.
FMI
https://www.maineturnpike.com/Projects/Planning/Gorham-Connector.aspx
