NORWAY – Eight months after the review began, the Norway Planning Board gave final approval Tuesday, with conditions, to Western Maine Development’s plans for an 161-acre office park overlooking Norway Lake and Route 118.

Key issues that had to be spelled out in minute detail concerned retention ponds protecting Norway Lake from phosphorus runoff, and impact of how many trees would have to be cut to build the roads, parking lots, the building sites themselves and two retention ponds. In addition, the board is ordering major improvements to be made to Roberts Road to accommodate the project, which, by 2009, is envisioned by one traffic study to generate an estimated 800 extra car trips a day.

Western Maine Development hopes to attract high-end office-based businesses to locate in the park and employ at least 500 people over the next 10 years.

Planning Board Chairman Dennis Gray read a detailed findings of fact on the project prepared by the town’s planning consultant, Fergus Lea, of the Androscoggin Valley Council of Governments.

Plans by Western Maine Development’s Technology Park Development Corp., a quasi-municipal authority of several towns that would share the park ownership and infrastructure development costs, call for around 10 office park lot sites to be nestled amid buffers from each other and the highway high up on the steeply sloping property, with the access off Roberts Road. The developed sites would take up 60 acres, with a requirement that the landscaping be designed as naturally as possible. Most of the steeply sloping areas of the property would be left as “conservation land” with the intent to leave as many of the tallest trees as possible standing.

Land use planner Tom Dubois of Main-Land Development Consultants Inc. said Western Maine Development will be asking the Department of Environmental Protection for an exemption from review under its Site Location Review law, based on the project’s emphasis on the use of conservation land. The developers will, however, need state approval of its stormwater plan.

Lea advised the board that the state could, if it did its own site review, create conflicting conditions. Dubois also said it would be quite expensive and could take up to six months or longer.

“I’ve seen DEP reviews, and as a Planning Board member, I have found them valuable,” board member Anne Kinney said.

“We’re picking up the issues of most critical importance,” Dubois said.

One key concern discussed Tuesday concerned the two retention ponds planned for the project, to handle stormwater and control the flow of a stream that runs through the property down to the lake. Lea said the board should take one last site walk after the project markers are in, to see if they think too much clearing of trees will need to take place.

“As they open up the drainage ditch and the retention ponds it could open up a fairly substantial area,” Lea said. He noted, however, that the 25-foot buffer requirements along the drainage ditches should help, and complimented Dubois on his attention to detail of the sensitive environmental concerns associated with the project.

Gray also added a condition that the town have an engineer go over the site design as it is developed before the town’s approval would be final.