A late night party at 17 Cleaveland St. last weekend was broken up after a neighbor's noise complaint prompted local police to intervene and issue verbal warnings to six residents of the property.
According to Lieutenant Mark Waltz of the Brunswick Police Department, the police received a phone call on 12:48 a.m. Sunday morning complaining of loud music coming from the residence.
When police officers arrived on the scene, "there were 20-25 people" at the house, according to Waltz. After asking their guests to leave, six of the 11 current residents were given disorderly conduct warnings for the loud noise.
Waltz said that last weekend's incident marked the first time local police were called to the residence.
"This is the first noise complaint we've had called in [for 17 Cleaveland St.]," he said.
The Brunswick Police Department responded to three other noise complaints that night.
"We had multiple noise complaints all over town that night, and this was just one of many," Waltz said.
The 11 tenants of 17 Cleaveland St. issued a statement to the Orient on Wednesday, briefly recounting the events that night and issuing an apology to their neighbors.
"We apologize to our neighbors for the disturbance, and hope they realize that we try very hard to minimize noise from our guests," the statement read. "We are very willing to respond quickly to any disturbances that may be caused and try our best to be respectful of the community."
The house at 17 Cleaveland St. has been the source of an ongoing legal dispute between neighbors of the property, the owners of the house (brothers Dmitri Seretakis '94, and Anthony Seretakis '95), and the town of Brunswick. A decision made by Codes Enforcement Officer Jeffrey Hutchinson last year that the property was not an "illegal boardinghouse" prompted an appeal from neighbors to the Cumberland County Superior Court. The case has not yet been heard.
During a December 4 town council meeting, a zoning ordinance which sought to limit the number of unrelated people who could live together in Brunswick to two?effectively nixing off-campus housing?was directed to the Brunswick Planning Board after it was introduced at the meeting. The measure was partly introduced because of the "code decision on 17 Cleaveland St. and the interpretation that took place there," Town Manager Donald Gerrish said at the December meeting.
Since then, the Planning Board decided not to change the zoning laws, but rather to enforce them more stringently.
"The Planning Board thought that it was primarily an enforcement issue," said Jim Fortune, planner in the Department of Planning and Development. "At this point, there's no proposal to make any changes to our [existing] ordinances."