Landfill opponents continue fight Old Town residents consider going to court to stop contested project

OLD TOWN – Local residents opposed to the West Old Town Landfill are seeking other avenues to stop the project since their appeals were denied last week by the Board of Environmental Protection.

Orono resident Paul Schroeder, along with a group of concerned area residents, recently submitted stacks of documents to the Consumer Protection Division of the Maine Attorney General’s Office regarding the project.

The record includes memos, e-mails, and faxes between state and local officials, as well as representatives of Georgia-Pacific Corp. and Casella Waste Systems from March 3, 2003, through the Oct. 21, 2004, BEP hearing on the appeals.

“It wasn’t so much a matter of a complaint because we don’t even know enough to make a complaint,” Schroeder said Wednesday. “All we know is what we see.

“We need someone else to look at it and make a decision if there is something going on.”

The landfill opponents first went to the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Portland, where officials, Schroeder said, told them that they were told to go the Maine Attorney General’s Office.

The three-way landfill deal in Old Town among the state, Georgia-Pacific Corp. and Casella Waste Systems was designed to keep the city’s 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.

Appeals to the BEP by We the People and Schroeder regarding the Department of Environmental Protection’s April 9 approval of the project were denied last Thursday.

With no other appeal options, the opponents’ next step likely would be through the court system.

“Cost is an issue,” We the People member Charlie Gibbs said Wednesday. “You have to have money to do that.”

Schroeder said he is considering taking the issue to court, but hasn’t decided. He noted that there is an abundance of information that he and other project opponents have gathered, some of which was outside the BEP’s jurisdiction and may need to be handled through the courts.

Those opposed to the deal previously have said the state’s original request for proposals was not a competitive process and that the deal was done before it was made public.

The state and Casella disagree, saying that proper public notification was published in a timely manner and that residents had ample opportunity for public input before the DEP approved the project in April.

“[Gov. John Baldacci is] confident that the [Request for Proposals] process was a fair one and that the involvement of the public was at an appropriate level,” Baldacci’s spokesman Lee Umphrey said Wednesday.

George MacDonald of the State Planning Office, the state agency that bought the landfill, is unavailable until Friday and could not be reached for comment.

The attorney general hasn’t given Schroeder a timeline as to when the documents will be processed, and reporters’ phone calls to the office were not returned on Wednesday.

“As we went through all of this information in getting our appeals ready, we wanted to understand what was really going on,” Schroeder said. “When we got to certain things, they just didn’t add up, or had never been brought up to the public, or looked contradictory to the original terms of the RFP [and] we decided to look for somebody who could give us some legal advice.”

Those opposed to the project said their main concern is to continue to educate the public.

“That’s the best that we can do right now, to try and make sure the public is informed,” Gibbs said.