LEWISTON – After years of talk, transportation experts from the state and its biggest highway plan to spend almost $1 million to look at adding new Maine Turnpike connections to Lewiston-Auburn’s downtown.

The study will also look at the need for another bridge spanning the Androscoggin River.

Public hearings are slated to begin this winter and some road work could start in 2008, said Ray Foucher, project manager for the Maine Department of Transportation.

Between $5 million and $8 million has been set aside for road changes, such as widened streets or new intersections, that might be allied to the construction of exits or a bridge.

Those big ticket items are still years away. The Maine Turnpike has earmarked 2012 to 2015 as a likely time for construction.

And that is only an estimate.

The project could face further delays if hearings find that people are undecided on what they want the changes to look like.

“Hopefully, it will all be settled by mid-to-late summer, 2007,” he said.

It would end a decade of debate.

Since the mid-1990s, people have been talking about creating another turnpike interchange in Lewiston-Auburn, one that would better serve the downtown than either of the existing exits. In 1998, the Lewiston City Council killed a measure that would have built an exit off of Grove Street

The idea has lingered ever since. New councils were elected in both Lewiston and Auburn, each endorsing pursuit of another exit, and transportation experts went to work.

“It has never been on the back burner,” said Conrad Welzel, government relations manager for the Maine Turnpike Authority.

Part of the time was spent talking with local officials, many of whom targeted an exit as an economic development aid.

Road officials wanted more.

“You have to have a great purpose and need for a project like this,” Welzel said. “It needs to show a clear, strong transportation need.”

Earlier this year, the Androscoggin Transportation Resource Center completed traffic analyses that proved what the Maine experts guessed, that another exit on either River Road in Lewiston or Riverside Drive in Auburn would greatly help traffic in the cities for the next quarter century.

The Maine Department of Transportation and the Maine Turnpike Authority has concluded a deal to hire a Vermont-based firm, Fay, Spofford & Thorndike Inc. to perform a study.

Its charge is to look at both sides of the Androscoggin River – along Lewiston’s River Road and Auburn’s Riverside Drive for possible locations for exits. It will also look at ideas for a bridge to be located somewhere between the current turnpike bridge and the south bridge, which connects New Auburn to Little Canada.

Welzel believes the study, funded cooperatively by the state and the turnpike authority, marks a milestone in the project.

“You don’t spend a million dollars lightly,” he said. And many other debated exits – in Falmouth, Saco, Ogunquit and Wells – have never reached this level.

“We aren’t studying any of those at all,” Welzel said.