CAPE ELIZABETH – The Cape Elizabeth Town Council took its first figurative steps down the Greenbelt Trail Monday, moving cautiously by acknowledging receipt of a new master plan for recreational paths, rather than actually accepting the document.

Created in 1977 with the primary goal of building a walking path to connect Fort Williams Park with Crescent Beach State Park, Cape Elizabeth’s Greenbelt Plan was updated in 1988 and again in 2001. That latter revision added a new vision – a “hub-and-spoke” network of trails designed to encompass the entire town. Since then, 11 miles of new trails have been created, extending the Greenbelt to 24.5 miles.

The next step, councilors agreed, will be a public hearing, possibly a workshop, potentially a site walk, and probably consultation with the town attorney. At least three times during Monday’s council meeting, the specter of a lawsuit was raised, should the new plan be implemented. Additionally, there have been numerous complaints about how the process of planning the town-wide trail network was undertaken.

Objections to the plan fall into two broad categories. One, largely resolved, involved farmers incensed that paths were planned to traverse their working fields and access roads. Most of those trails, seven in all, have since been removed from the proposal. However, some farmers continue to press public officials on the topic, largely out of principle, saying the town’s Conservation Commission, and thus, by extension, the town itself, overstepped its bounds.

“You should assess this plan from a property owner’s perspective,” Penny Jordan, co-owner of the Jordan Farm on Wells Road, told the council Monday.

“I honestly can’t believe it took me seven meetings [of the commission] to get my property removed from the point when I first said no,” Jordan said after the meeting.

The second area of contention is one specific path, still on the proposed list, intended to traverse an unbuilt section of Surf Side Avenue, a so-called “paper street” in the Shore Acres neighborhood that was laid out in the early 1900s when the land was first subdivided.

While some area residents call the potential shoreside trail a “wonderful addition” to the Greenbelt, others fret about public access on what has traditionally been viewed as a private road with specific deeded rights. Brian Livingston, of Pilot Point Road, noted in an email to the commission that only about half of the area residents in the private community belong to the Shore Acres Improvement Association. Others belong to the Ocean View Association, he said, and the town “may be intervening in something that will further divide the neighborhood.”

“Really what the problem is, is that we have a neighborhood dispute,” said Marshall Goldman, also of Pilot Point Road, at Monday’s meeting. “Because of the issue of the paper street and the Conservation Commission drawing a line on a map, that created an avenue to involve the town in something that, I think, most of our neighbors would agree we’d like to work out together, as opposed to bringing it to this point.”

According to Town Planner Maureen O’Meara, the preservation of open space has been a “consistently high priority” in Cape Elizabeth at least since the time of the first Greenbelt plan. Since 1995, land conserved for public use in town – either owned by the town or under the control of the Cape Elizabeth Land Trust with “legal public access rights” – has more than doubled, from 682 acres to about 1,700. However, given a goal in Cape’s comprehensive plan that calls for overhauling all master plans in town every seven years, the latest discussions are somewhat overdue.

More than a year in the making, the new plan envisions a trail system “thoroughly integrated throughout the town,” in which every Cape neighborhood – some of which did not exist when the first iteration was drafted 36 years ago – is within walking distance of a public path linked to the Greenbelt. Still in the plan are 23 proposed trails, six of which are deemed “priorities,” designed to extend the system town-wide.

The new plan was said to be influential in the Town Council’s decision last year to contribute $350,000 to the purchase of Robinson Woods II, a 70-acre open space that connects the Stonegate and Robinson Woods trail systems to the town center.

According to Conservation Commission Chairman Garvan Donegan, more than 60 residents weighed in at 14 public meetings held in the past year. Those included two public forums, along with special meetings with both the Cape Farm Alliance and the Riverside Cemetery Trustees. In addition, the commission received more than 200 emails and three petitions.

The Conservation Commission has said that where conceptual trails shown on its maps cross private property, “no trail or public access will be promoted without the willing participation of the landowner.” There will be no eminent domain takings for the trail system, said Donegan.

“It is the Conservation Commission’s intent to work with willing private property owners and to respect private property rights,” he said.

The disputed Surf Side path is not on the commission’s priority list. Of those six most desired paths, five are in the most heavily populated, northernmost section of town, near South Portland. The sixth would connect the Stonegate/Robinson Woods trail system to the town center.

Still, councilors agreed, they need to tackle the issue. Referencing a similar ongoing neighborhood dispute between the Spurwink Rod and Gun Club and residents of the Cross Hill subdivision, Councilor Katharine Ray urged her peers to stand tough and tackle the controversy head on.

“If we don’t push though this issue somehow, it’s going to come up again,” she said. “It will come up again a year from now, two years from now, 10 years from now. We’re not doing anybody any service by not trying to find a way to work through what the issue where we have two groups of people who are opposed to each other.”