FORT KENT — The proposed $8.1 million upgrading of Fort Kent’s 24-year-old sewer system has drawn battle lines here, with voters to determine the outcome tonight at the annual town meeting.

The Fort Kent Utilities District has proposed constructing an aerated lagoon treatment facility to upgrade the present system that has been plagued with problems almost from the day it opened in 1969.

Citizens at a public hearing March 17 agreed that an upgrade is needed. However, they were adamant that a plan to construct a lagoon within 1,000 feet of three housing subdivisions was not the way to go.

After the hearing, the Fort Kent Town Council voted unanimously to endorse the utilities district’s concept for an upgrade of the system. But the district, in a letter to users, wrote that the Town Council endorsed the concept of a new aerated lagoon.

The Town Council shot back late Friday saying the utilities district’s report was incorrect.

“Please be advised that the Fort Kent Town Council did not endorse the $8.1 million lagoon system or its location,” said the memo addressed to the utilities district and signed by four of five town councilors.

The proposed lagoon in the utilities district’s plan would be constructed about 4,000 feet west of the Fort Kent Town Office on a 112-acre site owned by Elmer Jalbert off Route 161. Owners of three nearby subdivisions, which are already approved or under way, protested the siting.

A petition was filed with the town office calling for a moratorium on the construction of any sewer system plant within two miles of the town office. The moratorium will be voted on by residents at tonight’s town meeting.

A total of 14 sites for the proposed lagoon were investigated by the Fort Kent Utilities District, its engineers and the Maine Department of Environmental Protection. Residents attending the March 17 hearing were told that the Jalbert site was the most promising of those investigated. A system, they were told, could be developed nearly anywhere, but construction costs could increase as much as $500,000 a mile if placed elsewhere.

The utilities district, in an eleventh-hour move last week, mailed a survey to its users on the upgrade proposal. They asked users to vote on three options: approving the $8.1 million aerated lagoon plan, upgrading the present facility on West Market Street, or moving the lagoon at least two miles from the town office.

Users were asked to return the surveys in time to have results tabulated for tonight’s town meeting.

Some users are angered by the district’s efforts. Michael Levesque, owner of one of the three subdivisions near the proposed lagoon site, said “people told them the lagoon should be located where it would affect the least amount of people and the least amount of property valuation.”

Levesque and at least a dozen homeowners who agreed with him at the March 17 hearing stressed that they were not against a system upgrade.

“It is the location of the lagoon that bothers people,” said Levesque. “I guess (the utilities district) did not get the message.”

He called the district’s survey “slanted. It’s all tilted toward their option to build the lagoon where they want it,” he said Thursday. “They have many options. I thought the public hearing showed them how people felt.”