Castle Hill sets rates and ordinances
CASTLE HILL, Maine — Summer is winding down but the town Castle Hill is at work on a number of issues, along with its municipal brethren Mapleton and Chapman.
Castle Hill’s mill rate will remain unchanged this year, at 14.6, said interlocal town manager Jon Frederick at a selectboard meeting. The mill rate for Chapman and Mapleton were both decreased slightly to 13.8 and 14.8 respectively.
The Castle Hill selectboard is being asked to consider a land use ordinance that is almost exactly the same as Chapman’s and Mapleton’s.
A land use ordinance helps a town plan for the future, said Frederick. “It sets the town up and your neighbors to have anything that could come down the pike be reviewed by a code enforcement officer at a minimum or a planning board,” he told selectboard members Herman Condon, Gerald McGlinn, Maylen Kenney and Robert Vigue.
“It addresses every possible use of land,” Frederick said. For instance, “if somebody comes in and slaps a development on a piece of farm plan and puts a road.”
The local planning board asked the Castle Hill selectboard to review the proposal and meet on October 5 to discuss the land use ordinance and then consider it during a town meeting.
In other news, the selectboard voted to authorize the town manager to issue BYOB permits in conjunction with the state.
The state of Maine requires BYOB permits for private affairs, such as weddings with bring your own alcoholic beverages, with a $10 fee and 72 hours notice. The town will also collect a $10 fee. The law is unclear what if any threshold qualifies for when people do or don’t need a BYOB permit, Frederick said.
Castle Hill is planning to scale back the pilot office hours project opening at 7 a.m. “We don’t have a whole lot of business at 7 to 8 and it’s disrupted the routine” of staff, Frederick said. Instead, Frederick wants to open on the last Saturday of every month to give people more convenient hours to apply for permits and licenses.
Castle Hill also has to figure out what to do about a former town septic field. It stopped accepting sewage in 2009 and the storage tanks “would never pass muster now,” said selectman Vigue.
