Boothbay and Boothbay Harbor property owners abutting Townsend Avenue viewed plans Oct. 18 for a sidewalk from the Boothbay Region YMCA through the Boothbay roundabout to the Boothbay Common and Clifford Park. The planning stage of the mile-long sidewalk has been rife with delays since 2012 when the Boothbay Region Community Trail Partnership (BRCTP) got a grant from the Maine Department of Transportation.

Sebago Technics’ vice president of transportation, Steve Sawyer, and Shane Kelly, transportation engineer, presented the plans at the meeting and took questions from the public. Representatives of the Boothbay Cemetery District voiced concerns the project might block or tamper with the entrance to Hillside Cemetery on Townsend Avenue.

“We have not done a boundary survey of the cemetery… (but) access will be maintained at all times,” said Sawyer, explaining that beside the temporary easement for construction, nothing would be touched or blocked on cemetery grounds.

The project is no longer expected to start next spring. “A lot of this is going to depend on how long the state will take to acquire all of the agreements with all the abutters — that will take the most time,” Sawyer said. “Once that’s done, then we’ll have a better sense of the timetable, but right now we’re estimating … it probably wouldn’t happen in the summertime given the traffic and everything else that’s going on — plan on the fall of 2018.”

Mary Neal asked how long the state will take to obtain the agreements. Nine months to a year, Sawyer said.

Neal also wanted to know more about the delays from the past year that prevented the sidewalk project from beginning earlier this year, and whether or not Sebago Technics has submitted the plans to the state yet.

“No,” said Sawyer. “(We want to) make sure that everybody along the route is comfortable with what we’re doing first, which is the purpose of today.”

“We had a big to-do this spring,” said Sawyer. “As time went on, costs went up, so all of a sudden, there wasn’t enough money. Apparently there were some agreements between the communities and the state that upped the budget and sort of committed the communities to a certain level of funding. Unbeknownst to the town managers, they didn’t raise enough money on the local side to match what the state said they were willing to give.”

The MDOT grant required towns to make a local match of 20 percent of the cost. The BRCTP and YMCA — through grant funding, donations and town contributions — have raised $134,170, exactly 20 percent of the estimated total cost of $670,856.