NEWRY – Officials from a large new restaurant at Sunday River ski area ran afoul of planners Wednesday night.

Owners believed work done on the property was insignificant modifications. Planners thought they were major, radical changes that should have been brought before the board.

Skip Bennett, representing the Phoenix House at One Timberline Drive, a 327-seat restaurant, told planners that parking and paving modifications were made after shortcomings to board-approved work were discovered.

The restaurant has been in business for nearly a year.

Modifications included moving the parking area closer to the building to comply with handicap regulations, and storm-water runoff work. Landscaping is in the works.

Bennett said planners approved 32 parking spaces, some of which were along the roadside. What restaurant officials did, he said, was move roadside parking areas closer to the building. They also added three more lots than were approved, increasing the parking area’s square footage.

“Common sense said to go with that,” Bennett said.

A drainage ditch was also deepened, and larger rocks installed to better control sediment from greater flows, like those of this summer’s rains, he said.

But board Chairman Joseph Aloisio, who buried his face in his hands through most of Bennett’s presentation, shaking it side to side, said the modifications made the business “very different than what we had approved.”

Aloisio was also upset that the Phoenix House owners paved the 17,000-square-foot parking lot, and that they disobeyed a Planning Board requirement that they come before the board before making any minor modifications.

“That’s not what was approved. You can’t increase the amount of runoff across a property line, but it’s obvious that you’re doing that,” he said.

Bennett shrugged it off as a misunderstanding.

Planners told him to bring an engineering report and a new storm-water analysis to determine pre- and post-development rates at the board’s next meeting.