By Dawn De Busk

Staff Writer

CASCO — A few decades ago, there was an antacid advertisement that posed the question, ‘How do you spell relief?’

If asked to define relief, certain committee members would say relief is having a completed, edited version of the Casco Comprehensive Plan draft.

The people experiencing a sense of relief would be the handful of citizens who served on the Casco Comp Plan Steering Committee (CCPSC).

The comp plan is now on the Town of Casco website, cascomaine.org. It can be located on the lefthand side of the home page, in one of the boxes under “Home News & Announcements.” The box says, “Public hearing: Draft Comprehensive Plan.”

The next step will be a public hearing on Dec. 19, held as a joint meeting of the Casco Board of Selectmen and Casco Planning Board. In the time between now and the public hearing in December, Casco residents can review the final draft Online.

Last week, during the selectmen’s meeting, the completion of the draft was met with a great deal of relief.

Casco Town Manager Anthony Ward asked, “Did you think this day would ever come?”

CCPSC Chair Rae-Anne Nguyen smiled.

“We are here to offer an update. After the roundtable in May, the committee took time to do all editing. We did it page by page to update maps…We created the implementation matrix, which will bring guidance,” Nguyen said. “We are pleased to send this to the board.”

She requested that a Comp Plan Implementation Committee be selected so that is in place before the Special Town Meeting in January. It is expected that the comp plan will be on the Special Town Meeting warrant. 

Casco resident Pam Edwards served on the steering committee, too. She referred to the group as “a team” that has been working together on this project for the past couple years.

“During this last review and these last edits, my ideas probably were different from Ryan’s [McAllister] and different from Rae-Anne’s [Nguyen] in some areas. We worked really hard to compromise. When we could not compromise, we would just move on,” Edwards said. “This plan represents not just the committee, but the whole town.”