BELFAST - A grant proposal to fund new seating and lighting on the footbridge captured the imaginations of local residents over the past three months, but was apparently not as compelling to the national arts funding organization ArtPlace, which dropped it from contention this week.

The downtown booster organization Our Town Belfast sought the city's support last fall in a bid to fund the annual "Please Be Seated" program — a popular summertime installation of artist-designed benches on sidewalks downtown and add artist-designed seating and decorative lighting to the footbridge.

The two pieces were unrelated, but they sounded similar enough that members of public and city officials envisioned benches made of lobster buoys and tree roots and other fanciful designs from "Please be Seated" lining the pedestrian bridge. Elaine Bielenberg of OTB later clarified that the seating would have been more subdued and designed by a single artist, but by then it was too late.

Former City Councilor Marina Delune had already enthusiastically referred to the lighting as a potential "exclamation point" to the planned Harbor Walk and envisioned raised bar-stool-style seats and tables that would allow a view of the harbor. And others on the Council were weighing in on the proposal.

The talk prompted veterans to turn out in opposition to what they saw as an affront to a bridge originally named Veterans Memorial Bridge and rededicated in 2010 as Armistice Bridge in memory of World War I soldiers. Friends of the Bridge, a citizen group that raised money for the reconstruction of the former Route 1 crossing in 2006 and later for a replacement memorial plaque also opposed the direction they saw OTB headed.

The two constituencies formed a coalition dubbed the Armistice Group and made a counter-proposal of six to eight precast concrete benches designed to match the appearance of the bridge. The benches were criticized as uncomfortable-looking by several councilors, but Tammy Lacher-Scully of Friends of the Bridge said that wasn't the point.

The original 27-foot-wide automobile bridge was narrowed to 12 feet when it was reconstructed as a bicycle and pedestrian crossing with the intention that it would primarily be used for transit, and not for congregation as was suggested in discussions of the OTB proposal, she said.

"The benches are just to provide a resting place for those using the bridge for transit or viewing the [memorial] tablet," she said.

The Council opted to wait for OTB's grant application to play out before talking about the proposal from the Armistice Group.

On Tuesday, Breanna Pinkham Bebb, OTB's executive director, said ArtPlace had notified her not to apply for the grant. Speaking on Friday, Bebb said OTB has no plan at the moment to pursue money from another source for the footbridge seating and lighting concept.

"It's just my hope that we continue to have a wider community conversation about what happens there," she said. "We're still open to being part of that discussion."

Lacher-Scully said the Armistice Group plans to go back to the city with a refined version of its own seating proposal sometime soon. In the interim, she polled around 40 members of of Friends of the Bridge and talked to others in the community who she said were almost universally supportive of the Armistice Group's idea.

Based on those conversations, her own long involvement with the bridge, the architecturally-consistent design of the benches, and the attention to the war memorial, she expressed confidence about the plan.

"I feel pretty good that we're representing a broad-based grop of community members," she said.

Contact Ethan Andrews by email at news@penbaypilot.com