WATERVILLE — The Proper Pig restaurant on Common Street in downtown Waterville is seeking the City Council’s approval to begin offering outdoor dining on part of the street during the week and all of the street on Friday and Saturday nights.

The council is expected to consider that and other requests when it meets at 7 p.m. Tuesday. The public can watch the meeting via a link on the city’s website — waterville-me.gov.

An executive session is scheduled for 6:30 p.m. to discuss labor negotiations with the Fire Department and a request to sell city property.

Councilors at recent meetings have said they want to help restaurants during the coronavirus pandemic because eateries must follow social-distancing and other guidelines set by the state, which have cost most restaurants some of their seating capacity.

The council has voted to allow outdoor dining, seasonally, in places such as The Concourse, and councilors have voted to authorize closing part of Silver Street to allow more space downtown for outdoor dining.

“We’ve closed Common Street in the past for certain events in the evening, so that’s nothing new,” City Manager Michael Roy said Monday. “I think everyone realizes that all of us kind of need to make things as economically beneficial as possible for the restaurants to do these things. It’s a little out of the ordinary, but this is certainly a ‘little out of the ordinary’ time.”

The Proper Pig submitted a plan asking that a 20-by-40-foot expansion covering the sidewalk and a section of Common Street be closed to traffic for outdoor dining from June 17 to Sept. 30. Traffic still would be able to flow through that section, it says.

In addition, the restaurant is asking that the dining area be expanded Friday and Saturday evenings, with the entire street closed to traffic from 5 p.m. to 10 p.m. The request is proposed as a one-year trial.

The Proper Pig now has a small outdoor dining area on the backside of its building, facing the Colby hotel that is now under construction.

In other matters Tuesday, the council is scheduled to consider approving a marijuana retail license for Mainely Glass/Greener Medical at 87 College Ave.; a secondhand license to William Bucklin, doing business as Clean Slate Property Services LLC at 55 Grove St.; and a request to rezone 174-192 College Ave. from Commercial-C to Contract Zoned District/General Industrial to allow for a live-in security guard to be at PRO Moving Service.

The council also is slated to consider accepting as a city street the final section of Meadow Drive in the Fieldstone Meadows subdivision.

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