A citizen petition with over 650 signatures has been turned in to the Town Clerk. The petition calls for a referendum to return the current ordinance back to the old ordinance thereby removing the verbiage of multi unit residential. This should effectively stop the 900 units from going into the Dennett rd. parcel.
Although the signatures need to be verified, the Town Council can act to return to the older ordinance forgo and the special election or move it to the referendum vote.
It should be clear to the Council and the Town Manager Kendra Amaral that there is a lot of resentment concerning this development. This needs to happen within the next 30 days. This is per the Town Charter.
Surprisingly, today in the Portsmouth Herald is an article about Affordable housing and tagged on to the heading was “possibly Dennett Landing” essentially making several of the units work force housing. This appears to be a move by the Town to pull at the heart strings of the citizens and use the buzz words that support the project. Although the article clarifies this. A public hearing is scheduled for June 29th, 2022.
However, it is suspicious to say the least, that after the petition of over 650 signatures and even with a count of adding over 160 what was required to change this ridiculous project was delivered in hand to the Town Clerk and the Town as required by the Town Charter, this move Pops from the shadows.
In my opinion, The timing is suspect and the Town in their surreptitiously standard MO of pulling a fast one, should be advising the public they received the Citizen petition and are acting on it by the procedures set forth by the Town Charter and pause any activity concerning the preposterous behemoth project that could bring well over 1800 new residents, traffic, increasing our dumps capacity, over burdening our old sewer treatment plant, bring a potential onslaught of students to the schools, taxing our public service departments, and a litany of other issues.
Kittery needs to do the right thing. Stay tuned, because the magic show is about to begin on June 29, 2022.
The article today should be a testament that the Portsmouth Herald has missed the real story again and or the Town of Kittery has failed to report the news (again) to the press and hoping to get in front of the major dilemma it is now facing. Let’s begin with HONESTY.
Below is a snippet from the Portsmouth Herald.
Kittery moves to increase affordable housing. 90 units possible at Dennett Landing.
IAN LENAHAN | Portsmouth Herald
KITTERY, Maine — Officials are moving aggressively to require affordable housing in town.
The Town Council will vote soon to expand a mandate requiring any development of five or more units to rent 10% of them at affordable rates. The rules would affect the proposed Dennett Landing development off Route 236, which could bring 900 housing units and upwards of 2,000 residents to town.
Kittery already requires affordable housing units — defined as no more than 30% of wages for people with moderate to low incomes — in certain zones of town. The new rules would expand this policy to the mixed-use neighborhood zoning district where Dennett Landing’s large-scale project is proposed.
Link to the Full Portsmouth Herald article.
More to come.