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Downtown Wastewater Meeting Dec. 4

Westbrook leaders will be holding a meeting on Monday, Dec. 4, at 6:30 p.m. in Town Hall for downtown property owners to review the conceptual wastewater plan for the town center. The meeting is open to the public.

At a Board of Selectman (BOS) meeting on Sept. 12, First Selectman John Hall announced that there had been some progress on efforts to fix one of Westbrook’s longtime concerns: finding a wastewater solution for the downtown.

At that time, Westbrook leaders received an estimate of $12 to $13 million to construct a wastewater system in downtown Westbrook. Before the town would move forward with any plan, town leaders said a meeting with nearby property owners in the downtown would be scheduled to discuss the next steps. That meeting has now been scheduled for Dec. 4.

“We want to encourage property owners and businesses in the Town Center to attend as they will most directly be impacted by the plan,” Town Planner Peter Gillespie said. Gillespie reiterated the meeting is open to all members of the public.

Working to revitalize Westbrook’s town center has been a decades-long goal for the town. The Town Center Revitalization Committee was first formed in 1997, and a 1998 report listed sewage disposal as a main concern for the area.

Over the years, residents have reported that prospective businesses have decided to open elsewhere due to the constraints the lack of an adequate system places on the area.

In 2022, town leaders met with members of the downtown community, and Hall said the citizens asked for a more concrete plan to be presented to them.

“They charged us to come back when we had a plan. Now we have a plan,” Hall told the Harbor News in September.

Earlier in 2023, the town allocated about $30,000 in American Recovery Plan Act (ARPA) money for a conceptual plan for a wastewater system in Westbrook’s downtown.

Hall said in the fall that the town would be looking to see what grants are available to help with the project and that the town has about $1 million in ARPA funding allocated for the project.

Gillespie has cautioned that even with the estimates for the project in, there is still a long process for the town to go through. Gillespie said that the town will have to make decisions relating to how much the town can contribute to the project and what, if any, grant opportunities are available. Once the public meeting with the area merchants is done, a more public process will be done.

Ultimately, the project will need to be approved by the whole community if it is to move forward. Speaking with the Harbor News before Election Day, Hall listed getting the project to a vote as a core item of interest for him.

“It’ll be up to the people to decide. There is a big cost, but it is also a significant issue for our town, and I want to see that finished,” Hall said at the time.