MILLINOCKET – Brookfield Renewable Power Inc.’s hydro-electric systems will only be allowed to use state bodies of water in ways that support papermaking if a town councilor’s proposal to change the state charter is accepted.

Councilor Jimmy Busque seeks to press state legislators to revert a charter clause addressing river usage to its pre-2004 language, which mandated that the systems directly support papermaking industries. It was changed when Inexcon Maine was about to sell the hydro-electric generators as part of its plans to continue modernizing the No. 11 paper machine at the Katahdin Avenue paper mill. The machine came online in 2004.

“It’s the people’s water,” Busque said Tuesday, noting that by state law, structures near Maine’s bodies of water can be privately owned but that the water belongs to the public. “That’s what Gov. [Percival] Baxter put in the charter.”

Peter Gordon, a managing partner at multibillion-dollar conglomerate Brookfield Asset Management of Toronto and chief executive officer of Fraser Papers, could not be reached for comment on Tuesday.

Brookfield Asset is parent of Brookfield Renewable and Katahdin Paper Co. LLC and has a controlling interest in Fraser Papers. Fraser and Katahdin Paper manage the East Millinocket and Millinocket mills.

Brookfield Asset on Aug. 26 ordered the Millinocket mill to shut down indefinitely and lay off 208 workers by about Sept. 2, citing the mill’s oil usage and expensive operation. The East Millinocket mill will remain operational.

The shutdown, Busque fears, will lead to Brookfield permanently closing the mill and using its hydropower to sell electricity out of state.

The water “isn’t supposed to be used to help sell electricity and take away jobs,” Busque said. “It has to create jobs. That was his [Baxter’s] intent. I just want to put it [the Charter] back to the way it was.”

The state Legislature’s approval of the charter change is required, but Busque is undaunted.

“We have got to go down fighting,” Busque said. “We can’t just sit back and watch this happen.”

If nothing else, Busque and Councilor Scott Gonya’s proposals show how deeply the indefinite shutdown is resented in the Katahdin region, a papermaking home for 100 years. Admitting that his idea was partially coercive, Gonya wants the council to discuss using eminent domain against Brookfield.

Clarifying earlier statements, Gonya said in an e-mail Sunday that he was interested in taking public control of the mill’s 32-megawatt generating station and Stone Dam, which is on mill property.

“I do not want anything else,” Gonya wrote. “The generating station is the cornerstone of our community and I will not let it go uncontested.”

The generator could become a public utility that would sell electricity at low rates to residents and serve as a magnet for industry, he said.

Councilors will discuss the Busque and Gonya proposals at a meeting with all interested mill parties, including possibly unions and state legislators. No date has been set, council Chairman Wallace Paul said.

Paul plans to recuse himself from those discussions. As a system operator at Brookfield Renewable’s Millinocket office, he fears a conflict of interest. Potential or actual conflicts of interest often are resolved by recusal, in which officials can participate in discussions but opt not to vote on them.

Whether Busque and Gonya, both Katahdin Paper workers, will make the same decision, or already have decided otherwise, was unclear Tuesday.

“That will be up to them,” Paul said.

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