GREENVILLE — Advertisements placed in forest products trade publications seeking investors for a proposed wood panel mill in Greenville have received responses.

Town Manager David Cota told selectmen Wednesday that the inquiries, including one from a Fortune 500 company, looked promising.

The $1,000 in advertising, funded through the economic development account, is an effort by the town to help a developer secure the remaining $1.2 million needed for a proposed $4 million wood panel mill.

The town was awarded a $500,000 infrastructure grant to construct a building to house the panel mill. Once his funding has been secured, Paul Mercer of Greenville Wood Products Inc. would lease the facility until the grant was repaid. The building then would be under Mercer’s ownership. If construction on the building is not well under way by the contract end date of Sept. 30, 1996, the town will lose the grant.

The town’s panel mill investment committee is reviewing and familiarizing itself with the latest business plan submitted by Mercer. “It shows a very good rate of return,” said Cota. The review should be completed within a week, he said. At the same time, the committee is following up on the inquiries and with Mercer’s permission is forwarding copies of his business plan.

Selectmen agreed Wednesday evening that the town should supply the cover material for the landfill, rather than leaving it up to the landfill contractor. This would allow the town to bid out the operation of the landfill in February.

“The town will supply the cover material. That takes a lot of uncertainty out of the bids for the operation of the landfill and should make for a much better bidding process,” Cota said.

Civil Engineering Services Inc. of Brewer believes it could cost the town as much as $3,800 to find a site or sites for the cover material for the old Sawyer Pond dump and the current landfill. The town will be eligible for 75 percent reimbursement for that portion of the cost for finding cover material for the old dump, according to Cota.

The town, with assistance from the Eastern Maine Development Corp., will submit a Community Development Block Grant application for a downtown improvement project. The project includes some land acquisition and easements to enlarge the steamship Katahdin parking lot, to create a public parking area in back of the current post office and to make improvements to the waterfront, including a boardwalk from the Katahdin lot to Thoreau Park, and the construction of restrooms and sidewalk improvements.

“Unfortunately, there is no specific downtown improvement category within the CDBG program. This is somewhat of a long shot, but we’ll give it our best shot,” Cota said.