POLAND — Voters will set the budget for the coming year and decide some land use issues at the annual town meeting on Saturday, April2, at 9 a.m. at the Poland Regional High School.

“Now’s the time to put some design standards in place for the southern gateway to town. We don’t want anything gaudy at what’s the entrance to our historic district,” Town Manager Dana Lee said.

Voters will be asked to amend the zoning map by adding a Village 4 District in the vicinity of the intersection of Routes 26 and 122. The design standards included in the proposed amendment are intended to encourage development that would be compatible with people’s vision of what a New England village ought to look like.

“We want to avoid the Stripmall USA look,” Lee said.

For motorists traveling north on Route 26, this is the area at the base of the hill by the State of Maine Building and the Poland Spring Inn and golf course complex. A year ago voters approved a funding plan to bring water and sewer lines to the area in order to foster commercial development and expansion of the town’s tax base.

Voters are also being asked to approve amendments to the Waterhouse Brook Resource Protection District. Lee noted that the committee looking at the long range future of the town’s fire station property discovered that existing regulation would make it impossible to enlarge the fire station, should the need arise.

The existing Poland Beach Ordinance, which was passed in 1982, “lacks teeth,” according to Lee, as evidenced by the mistreatment of the town-owned beach on Tripp Lake off Route 11.

“Dirty diapers, needles. The way some treated the beach last summer was just horrible,” Lee said.

The amended ordinance not only has teeth, but calls for using fees collected from out-of-town residents to help support a part-time beach attendant.

Townspeople are being asked to authorize selectmen to apply for a Communities for Maine’s Future grant to help with the expansion of the cultural history museum at the old schoolhouse. Space to store and exhibit donations to the Poland Historical Society has run out. The society would be responsible for raising grant matching funds for a proposed memorabilia barn and expanded parking in the municipal complex area.

Voters will also be acting on the traditional annual town budget, which, according to Lee, is a “no new taxes” budget.

As proposed, the budget, which has the unanimous support of both the Board of Selectmen and the Budget Committee, contains pay increases for town employees. Some comments received at last week’s candidate forum indicated that not everyone in town thinks this is a good time for pay raises, but Lee explained that with employees picking up more of their health insurance costs the raises were about a wash.

Lee noted that the budget includes increases in Planning Board and code enforcement fees.

He also reported that town auditors discovered that the town has about $129,000 that was “over-raised” in 2009. This amount will augment what is asked to be set aside for capital improvement projects and project reserves, bringing the total to $938,143.

“The reality is, that as large an amount as this seems, with 50 miles of roads to take care of and everything else, we probably should be putting more aside, if we could afford it,” Lee said.