AUBURN — It’s too soon for campers at the Auburn-Lewiston YMCA’s future 93- acre River Road camp and hiking and biking trails are not set yet, but Chief Executive Officer Steve Wallace said the community is ready for it.
“People send us emails, they ask us when it’s going to be done, can they come in and see the plans. That kind of thing,” Wallace said. “We have not heard a single negative off of this project.”
Wallace and a contingent from the Maine National Guard’s 262nd Engineering Company offered media and some city officials a look around the site Monday afternoon.
Currently, a group of about 12 from the 262nd are using heavy equipment to grade an entrance and a parking lot into the site just off River Road. So far they’ve carved parking into the site with a temporary connection to River Road. Wallace said the lot will connect to a permanent River Road driveway later this summer. A second extension will eventually connect to Stetson Road, he said.
Wallace said the new camp will replace the YMCA’s three-acre Camp Conner in Poland but that won’t be for some time. He expects the new Auburn camp, with room for up to 500 kids, will be ready to open sometime in 2018, complete with hiking and biking trails and athletic fields.
“The area we’re working on now, it’s already bigger than Camp Conner, so it really is no trade-off,” Wallace said. “We have so much more room to work with here. Plus, being on Bobbin Mill Brook gives us a lot of potential things to do with the kids.”
The 262nd are an engineering unit devoted to horizontal work — building roads, runways, landing strips and culverts. The 262nd also has teams working on projects at Boy Scout camps Bomazeen in Belgrade and Gustin in Sabattus.
Captain Kerry Boese of Cumberland said projects like this let the team practice its skills while helping out communities.
“We try and go out and give back to our communities,” Boese said. “But it really helps us with our training objectives while we prepare for state and federal missions. It’s something we are trying to get back to, to do more than we have in the past.”
The YMCA purchased the Stetson Road property in 2011 and announced work on the camp in December. The property includes trees and fields along Stetson and North River roads between the Androscoggin River and Route 4 in Auburn.
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