AES preparing for trial in bid for plant permit

ELLSWORTH — After losing a motion for summary judgment last month, attorneys for AES Harriman Cove Inc. are preparing to go to trial against the town of Bucksport in an attempt to regain a building permit for the controversial coal-fired power plant.

Michael Kaplan, a Portland attorney representing AES, has filed a motion for trial in Hancock County Superior Court to resolve the company’s longtime bias claim. AES continues to charge that members of the Bucksport Zoning Board of Appeals harbored clear prejudices against the 180-megawatt plant when the board reversed a Bucksport Planning Board decision to grant a shoreland zoning permit to AES last February.

Attorneys for those allied against the project described AES’s motion for summary judgment as the company’s effort to gain a favorable decision through a procedural shortcut requiring the court’s examination of the argument solely on the facts.

In denying the company’s motion last month, Superior Court Justice Margaret J. Kravchuk said the facts before the court were clearly disputable.

In a memorandum supporting the company’s motion for trial, Kaplan said the issue of alleged bias by ZBA members involved factual matters within and without the official ZBA record, including petitions against AES circulated by Chairman Paul Domencovich.

Kaplan said the court also should consider certain extrinsic matters, and cited affidavits filed by AES opponents indicating when the petitions might have been signed.

“The evidence will show that both petitions were circulated and signed after AES’s first (1990) application was denied and incapable of being appealed, and that both must have been intended to forestall or influence AES’s second application,” the attorney wrote.

Attorneys for the plant’s opponents are expected to file responses to AES’s motion and pending court approval, pre-trial hearings would be scheduled in upcoming months.

In an effort to prepare for the huge volume of evidence and transcripts comprising the ZBA record, employees in Hancock County Superior Court are attempting to find new space in their already cramped accommodations. Court employees have jokingly suggested that the county may have to spring for a new wing just to house the official AES record during the trial.