Tony Casella’s longtime plan for a 48-unit hotel on Davis Island may be obsolete if a new proposal to build three single-family cottages on the property is approved.
Surveyor Karl Olson, representing Casella, met with the Edgecomb Planning Board Thursday, April 16 in a pre-application meeting for a subdivision proposal on the property previously slated for the hotel.
With the construction of three cottages on an approximately 10-acre lot near the corner of Route 1 and Eddy Road in Edgecomb, the property will achieve maximum density, Olson said. If approved, the new subdivision plan would mean the end of Casella’s Davis Island hotel project.
In the preliminary meeting, Olson shared the interior design of the cottages and the site plan for the lot. The cottages would be three-bedroom, three-bath, single-family structures with a three-car parking area on Island Way, a private subdivision road.
The lot already contains an office building and a three-unit building. However, if the subdivision application for the cottages is approved, the lot will need to be redesignated as a condominium lot, Olson said.
The change in designation of the lot will not affect the use of the office building because mixed use of the property is allowed, planning board members said.
If the cottages are built, they are expected to become a part of a condo association, Olson said. Olson said he expects maintenance of the subdivision road to be handled by the condo association.
However, Olson did not know whether a new condo association will be formed or the cottages will be incorporated into one of the existing condo associations on Davis Island.
Casella is not considering constructing a septic system for the new development, Olson said. The development will need to be able to cut through nearly a decade of complicated legal wrangling to access Davis Island’s water and sewer lines.
Water and sewer line access, however, is limited to the purview of the selectmen and not in the jurisdiction of the planning board.
The planning board requested a landscaping plan for the subdivision and voted to move forward to the next step in the application process provided the development was able to access water and sewer lines.
According to Edgecomb’s development ordinance, all subdivision applications must undergo a pre-application meeting and a site inspection before the official application is considered. The site inspection has not been scheduled yet and Casella’s representatives have not yet contacted Edgecomb selectmen to broach the subject of water and sewer lines.
