AUGUSTA – The State Planning Office, as the owner of the West Old Town Landfill, has challenged appeals made to the Board of Environmental Protection to reverse a previous order permitting the project.

Because of the appeals, the state and Casella Waste Systems Inc., the state’s chosen landfill operator, have slowed down development of the site, and officials have said they do not want to delay further scheduled developments at the facility.

“[The appeals] did slow down what we were planning on doing, so they did have an impact,” George MacDonald of the State Planning Office said Tuesday. “We were planning on constructing additional capacity at the site this summer, but that’s been put on hold.”

The motion to dismiss the appeals, filed jointly by the state and Casella, was filed with the BEP on June 4. The BEP is expected to decide on the request for dismissal before the board’s July 15 meeting.

“We’re very confident in the order [approving the landfill] … we think it’s a very good order, and it will be upheld,” Casella’s Don Meagher, Casella’s manager of planning and development, said Tuesday. “But it’s just not a prudent business decision to spend tens of millions of dollars without a final permit.”

The motion to dismiss the appeals comes as no surprise to members of We the People, a local opposition group that has appealed the landfill’s approval.

“I think they’re going to try any way possible to keep us from having a say in the matter,” Stan Levitsky, We the People member and Old Town resident, said Tuesday. “They don’t make it easy for us to have a voice.”

The three-way landfill deal among the state, Georgia-Pacific Corp. and Casella was designed to help keep the Old Town paper mill open while addressing the state’s waste disposal problem. The state bought the site from G-P for $26 million and chose Casella, which runs the Pine Tree Landfill in Hampden, to operate it.

Department of Environmental Protection Commissioner Dawn Gallagher approved the project in April.

“They did not stop the work [at the landfill], but in looking at the whole picture, we don’t know if the appeals will be heard or dismissed, if they will be acted on or not,” MacDonald said. “Caution is probably the word I would use at this point.”

Three appeals were filed with the BEP in May. One came from We the People, another from Orono resident Paul Schroeder, and the third from Kim Lomler. Lomler’s request, however, isn’t being considered because it was filed after the deadline.

We the People is composed of residents in Alton and Old Town, including those whose property abuts the landfill, people who live near the access road and other concerned residents. Schroeder is an Orono resident who is concerned about heavy truck traffic going through town to reach the landfill.

“We felt there was sufficient grounds to question the standing and the filing of the appeals,” MacDonald said.

A letter has been sent to each of the appellants notifying them of the dismissal request, and they have until Monday, June 21, to respond.

BEP Presiding Officer Virginia Plummer then will announce her decision as to whether the appeals will be dismissed.

If any of the parties involved disagree with Plummer’s findings, they can request that the board as a whole review her decision at the regular July 15 BEP meeting.

The board also will decide at that meeting whether a formal adjudicatory hearing is warranted on the issue. This has been a request of opponents to the project that has been denied since the landfill deal was made public.

“I think that what they’re attempting to do is what they need to do to push the project forward, and I would hope that democracy would win out here,” Levitsky said Tuesday. “I feel that the BEP has communicated with us much better than the DEP has.”

The appeals have two major concerns in common, that:

. The DEP didn’t conduct a thorough enough investigation of the impact the landfill will have on the environment and nearby communities.

. The DEP violated the public’s right to a formal hearing on the project.

We the People’s appeal also requests that BEP Chairman Richard Wardwell recuse himself from the issue, which he has done. Wardwell provided consulting services to Casella as a soils engineer for the State Planning Office during the permitting process.

“This may be taken as yet another case study in the reasons why Americans generally distrust their government along with the economic interests this government primarily serves,” Schroeder said in his appeal.

The DEP commissioner previously has denied that the process was not thorough and said the public had ample opportunity for input, including a two-day public comment session that was conducted under oath. All comments from this session were recorded and became part of the official record on the landfill permit.

“I have to base my decision on the environmental aspects of it and the geological aspects, and from that perspective, it did meet the test,” Gallagher said in a prior interview.

The State Planning Office disputed the appeals in its motion to dismiss saying that “neither We the People or Mr. Schroeder has established standing as an aggrieved person to support their appeals.” The state office also questioned whether the appeals were filed before the deadline.

The State Planning Office claimed that We the People attorney Marcia Cleveland of Brunswick sent an e-mail and faxed version of the appeal on the May 10 deadline, but neither of these were signed. The hard copy version mailed to the office the next day was not the same as the faxed and e-mailed versions.

Cleveland was working on the landfill case Tuesday and could not be reached for comment.

Attorneys for the SPO and Casella stated in the motion that the hard copy differed “in many notable respects from the faxed and electronically submitted documents.” Examples cited included the addition of statutory and regulatory citations, the deletion and addition of entire paragraphs, the addition of a conclusion section and the correction of “numerous misspellings and typographical errors.”

Residents opposed to the project do not plan on backing down.

“At every point in this case the state has acted to narrow the grounds upon which the interests of the public, both those directly affected and the interests of Maine’s citizens at large, could be expressed and heard,” Schroeder said in his appeal. “This process will have serious negative long-term consequences for the state and its citizens.”

We the People members previously have stated that they will take their case all the way to the courts if necessary.

“This is a long-term battle, and we’re in it, and we’re going to stick with it,” Levitsky said.