AUBURN — Little Androscoggin Trail designs and a final home for the bells removed from St. Louis Church in New Auburn will be topics at a public meeting Wednesday, Oct. 26.
City Planner Doug Greene said the city is hosting a final design meeting for 20 years’ worth of New Auburn Village redevelopment plans at 6 p.m. at Walton Elementary School, 92 Mary Carroll St.
The redevelopment plan covers a range of work called for in 2011’s New Auburn Master Plan, as well as 2014’s New Auburn Village Center and Transportation plan.
“We want to make sure we are doing the right things with the trails, for example,” Greene said. “We are planning on having a trail be ADA-accessible down to the water with a dock where everybody, including people in wheelchairs, could go down and fish. We have some basic things like that and we’d like people to weigh in.”
The most recent work calls for constructing a park and trail area along the Little Androscoggin River, and redesigning Second Street to become pedestrian-friendly, lined with buildings on one side that could contain shops, restaurants and new housing. The goals of the plan are to increase property values, bring in investment, attract new residents and create an urban, walkable village center.
“So we have some updates for everyone on plans to expand traffic studies and intersection improvements,” Greene said. “Speed of traffic and pedestrian safety have been big topics for residents, so we want designers to look at every intersection from the bridge from Lewiston to the bridge going to the downtown. We want to make as many improvements to the traffic as we can.”
Greene said planners also have suggestions for publicly displaying the old St. Louis Church bells.
Community members and New Auburn businesses raised money to buy the four historic Paccard Foundry bells from the Catholic Diocese of Maine when St. Louis Parish in New Auburn was decommissioned in 2012. The former tower bells have been stored at Cote Crane & Rigging’s Auburn warehouse since they were removed from the church.
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