Town officials are working through a plan that would renovate the parking lot at Hurd Park and provide better amenities for those visiting Pine Point Beach. Michael Kelley / The Forecaster
SCARBOROUGH — The facilities at Hurd Park — which many use to access Pine Point Beach — are due for some badly needed upgrades, and improvements may include a new parking layout, improved bathroom and a new concession stand or food trucks.
Town Manager Tom Hall said with Ferry Beach and Higgins Beach facilities updated, the building at Pine Point, which houses the bathrooms/outdoor showers and a concession stand, is in need of improvement.
“The bathrooms and showers haven’t been updated for who knows how long,” said Todd Souza, who, as director of community services, oversees operations at the facilities. “It is one of the older facilities in town. Ferry Beach has been updated, so has Higgins. Seeing the foot traffic it gets (at Pine Point), we determined this was a priority.”
Souza said last year, close to 12,400 passes were sold to people visiting Pine Point for the day, close to double that of Ferry Beach (6,206) and more than three times the number of passes for Higgins Beach (3,221). Those figures don’t include the number of season passes sold.
“They are substandard, not just for the users. They have been causing an ongoing maintenance concern for us,” Hall said of bathroom and shower facilities. “We’ve known we had to do something with the bathhouse for some time and while we were doing that, look at what we could do, if anything, about the efficiency in the parking lot.”
Souza said the plan, as it is proposed now, calls for removing the concession stand and renovating the bathhouse building into expanded men’s and women’s bathrooms, as well as several gender-neutral bathrooms/changing rooms and seasonal outdoor showers.
“Ultimately it will come down to cost, but the goal is to have a year-round facility like we do at Higgins Beach,” Souza said.
Currently, the bathrooms are only open from May to September, with a portable toilet available in the offseason.
A renovation of Hurd Park at Pine Point would include a reworked parking lot, redesigned bathhouse and a small park next to the dunes. A funding request for the work will be part of next year’s town budget. Courtesy / Town of Scarborough
The plan would also include a park area by the dunes, complete with picnic tables, stone benches, new landscaping and a pad either for a food truck or new concession stand, as well as re-configuring and striping the parking lot and adding exit-only access to King Street. The main entrance of the lot would remain off Fifth Avenue.
“The town is working though a food truck ordinance right now, so we’ve left it as an unknown at this point if we allow food trucks there or build another structure,” Souza said.
Reworking the parking lot, Hall said, was done in an effort to respond to concerns in the neighborhood about people circling the neighborhood or idling in the streets waiting for a parking spot in the lot to free up.
“We are trying to be neighborly and fit in the neighborhood as best we can. Finding a new way to flow the parking is a part of being a good neighbor,” he said.
Souza said the plan has been vetted through four neighborhood meetings and is now ready for review by the ad-hoc transportation committee, which will take the topic up next month. The goal is to bring the plan before the town council this spring and include a funding request as part of the fiscal year 2021 budget.
The town’s capital improvement plan had recommended setting aside $400,000 for the project, but Hall said that figure was a guess. The intention is to pay for the project, whatever that cost is, through the beach reserve account, a fund generated by parking fees and passes.
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