The Saco City Council met on Monday, September 22, 2025, at 6:38 PM. The meeting began with a joint session with the Planning Board for a housing state statute update, followed by legislative updates from state representatives, public comment on a proposed rent increase at Blue Haven Mobile Home Park, and action on several agenda items. Key outcomes included tabling a street acceptance request, approving a special entertainment permit, acknowledging updates to the Planning Board's Standard Operating Procedures, and directing staff to explore options regarding a potential moratorium on lot rent increases.
Good evening, everyone, and welcome to the Sacco City Council meeting for Monday, September twenty-second, twenty twenty-five. Um, before we call the official meeting to order, we do have a joint meeting tonight with the planning board for a couple of updates. Um, and with us tonight, we do have members of the planning board. And the first item up is item A, which is a housing state statute update. Thank you, Mayor. In absence of a city planner while we look to fill the city planner role. Bear with me as I provide the update with the planning board, if you can uh accommodate that this time. So a quick presentation here, and then I'll hand it off to everyone. Just a little recap from June to September. So uh June 2024 to today. I had to go back myself and look at all the good work we've done. So thank you for all the time you spent on these important matters. This is just a recap of uh the twelve workshops we've had. It's a little more than twelve because some of them we did multiple uh workshops on some housing updates. I won't uh seal too much because we have our legislative updates right after this. The two primary bills that we're tracking are LD eighteen twenty-nine and LD fourteen ninety-eight. Eighteen twenty-nine has uh impacts for housing lot sizes, how many units can go on one lot, the definition of subdivision, um, and some other provisions as well, including planning board training and how we look at uh ADUs and sprinkler systems. LD fourteen ninety-eight has to do with the impact fee statute and how impact fees can be encumbered going forward. Uh currently there's a long uh period that you can have impact fees before the improvement has to be made that the impact fee was set aside for. This will change that so that the impact fee has to be encumbered for certain projects within one year of the impact fee being collected. The question that we've had, or the way that we're interpreting that is it's uh going to be impact fee encumbered within one year to the capital fund. And we're working on that and tracking that as staff. Um, other red line ordinance amendments that we were previously drafting as a result of these twelve plus workshops, some of which will be redrafted to reflect these law changes that we've been working on, and as we get a new city planner pulling them into that process as well. We did also share with the planning board as well as the long-range planning committee a list of uh bills that we were tracking that affect housing. Um these are the probably the primary two, but there's a whole list I can show you after this that uh you can we can send the links out and make sure that you have. So we are still working on red line ordinance amendments. I did present to the long range planning committee back in June and then in August about moving forward, focusing first on the site plan review ordinance, and then following up with subdivision and zoning as the subdivision and zoning ordinances will have to be amended a little bit further to accommodate for the state law revisions. We also did some great work with the long range planning committee in the fall time. Counselor Hatch had brought forward some recommended items to look at. Those went through our subcommittee review process of the long range planning committee. Uh, that committee, that subcommittee met a few times and really dove into what design review standards could look like and how some of those updates that councillor Hatch recommended could be put into our ordinance. So we have red lines of those as well for the site plan review ordinance primarily, and some of the subdivision ordinance. Um, the next step of this would be to finish out those red lines um and then bring this to planning board and then to city council. I could pause here so we can allow another board member to join us. So um upcoming uh we will also be having a joint meeting with the long range planning committee to go over some of that subcommittee work from uh fall 2024. Uh we will also be looking to have new business review to be scheduled so you can at least get an eye on the drafts that we have, and we can share the link to the draft that we shared with the long range planning committee. I did share what we had for site plan review and asked for edits. I did receive some minor edits from LRPC members, so appreciate that. And then anticipated drafts just as an FYI. We are still um closing out the Portland Road Master Plan. We did a lot of great public comment. I didn't have that on our list because it was a relative to the to the long range plan, but we did a lot of great public comment and business breakfasts, and so we are anticipating a fall 2025 draft of that plan as well as a winter 2025 early 2026 draft of the housing action plan. So it'll be exciting to see some of this closing out. And then here's just a list of ongoing planning projects that we are excited to either be in the implementation phase of or the drafting phase, or um, some of them require longer periods, but a lot of a lot of interesting work happening and and uh coming to the finish line. So that's great. So um I didn't want to go too far into the legislative updates, uh, but we I'm happy to answer any questions about this presentation, and thank you for listening. Great, thank you. Any questions from counselors? Any qu up counselor hatch? Thank you, Mayor McPhil.