(Editor’s note: Looking Back is a weekly column including news items reported 10 years ago in The Current, which celebrated its 10th anniversary in September 2011.)

Issue of July 11, 2002

Tim Downs abruptly resigned as a town councilor, effective immediately, on Monday because he is moving out of town.

He told Town Clerk Yolande Justice that he was moving to Limerick, where he would be closer to his job.

Downs was a clam digger and the master of the Oak Hill Grange. He was one of two remaining councilors who grew up in Scarborough. His family has been in town since the 1630s. (The other native councilor is Mark Maroon.)

The seal pup didn’t look as though it was recovering from a gunshot wound to the head this week. As soon as the pup got free from human hands, it bobbed energetically across the pavement to nuzzle the other baby seal in the cage.

“She doesn’t like to be alone,” said Greg Jakush, the president of Marine Animal Lifeline.

When the pup came in last week after a Scarborough resident reported a seal pup crying at Pine Point Beach, Jakush gave her a 50 percent chance of survival. The bullet had bounced off her skull and missed her eye by only a centimeter, a distance that probably saved the pup’s life.

At a meeting Monday night, the Cape Elizabeth Town Council more than doubled the price a developer would have to pay in impact fees if the development doesn’t meet the town’s open space requirement.

The new impact fee would cost a developer $4,320 for every lot that didn’t come with at least 12,545 square feet of open space. The old impact fee, adopted in 1995, charged developers $2,080 if they didn’t provide at least 9,060 square feet of open space.

The updated fees were approved by a vote of six to one, with Mary Ann Lynch casting the dissenting vote. Town Council Chairman Jack Roberts said the council approved the new fees partly because the old ones have been so successful: the town hasn’t collected a dime.

A proposed Mercedes Benz car dealership on Route 1 has enough votes to receive contract zone approval from the Town Council, after one councilor resigned and another decided to change his vote.

Crystal Smyth, a 1997 graduate of Scarborough High School and a member of Scarborough’s Conservation Commission, is working this summer on a project for Community Services mapping all the town’s trails, parks and recreational places.

Smyth is an environmental technology student at Southern Maine Technical College (SMTC) in South Portland. She is working as an intern for Community Services this summer to complete her graduation requirements. Smyth then hopes to get a degree in environmental science and policy at the University of Southern Maine.

Smyth is working with computer programs collecting information on global positioning and geographical information systems (GIS). With the GIS system Smyth is able to attach data to maps, including where the best views are and the width of a particular trail. Smyth has already spent much of her time out in the field, walking the Eastern Trail from the Old Blue Point Road over to Highland Avenue in South Portland and walking over the town’s parks.

Piles of dirt and the almost constant sound of pounding and sawing are accompanying a $1.4 million expansion of Scarborough’s St. Maximilian Kolbe Church off Black Point Road.

Work has been going on since late May on the expansion that will include the construction of a new rectory, a new classroom wing, an expanded parish hall and kitchen and a 50 percent increase in the parking lot.

The work is necessary, according to St. Max’s Father James Morrison, because the church membership is outgrowing the church at a rapid rate. When St. Max’s was built 12 years ago the parish had 500 families; now the parish counts 1,600 families as members. “We have just plain run out of space,” Father Morrison said.

Scarborough’s official town bird, the piping plover, is back on the beaches in larger numbers than before. Biologists with the Maine Audubon Society have found that Scarborough’s sandy beaches host a total of 24 adults, or about 17 percent of the state’s total number of piping plovers.

Apair of piping plovers has made two nesting attempts on Scarborough Beach and five chicks have already hatched from nests found at Pine Point. On Higgins Beach, four nests are active–nine chicks have already hatched, and more eggs are due to hatch soon.

Scarborough’s piping plovers are the hope of what has become a tough year for the birds–plovers nesting on Scarborough’s beaches have produced more than half of the state’s chicks so far this season.

“We can all do our part to share our beaches and help these endangered birds have a good nesting season,” said Conservation Commission Chair Stephanie Cox.

The seal pup on the right is shown recovering from a gunshot wound to its head in this photo from July 11, 2002.