HAMPDEN — The Town Council on Monday approved a request by Sawyer Environmental Recovery Facility to postpone submission of a closure plan for part of the landfill. The town expected to receive the plan by year’s end.

In addition SERF will increase the capacity of that part of the landfill, named Secure II, which accepts ash from Penobscot Energy Recovery Co., according to Marty Drew, general manager for SERF.

Anticipating another ash-disposal contract with PERC, SERF had planned to close Secure II and to start putting incinerator ash into a new part of the landfill. Named Secure III and commonly called the deep ditch, the new part was to start being filled by Thanksgiving.

But PERC has not signed a disposal contract with SERF. In fact, PERC and the committee formed to oversee the trash-to-energy business at Orrington are considering transporting ash to a landfill at Norridgewock.

While waiting for the ash contract to be awarded and “modifying” the sides of Secure II, SERF “can’t do justice to engineering a closure plan without more time,” Drew said. The closure plan will be due Feb. 28.

Although Drew said during a meeting of the council that SERF would be the cheaper option, he conceded that the “PERC contract would be difficult to land.”

Expanding Secure II is a ploy to “keep PERC at the dock,” Drew explained. He said it probably will not be decided where PERC will take its ash until the new year.

“I don’t like it,” remarked Councilor Donald Muth. He added that Hampden is but a pawn in the waste-disposal games played by environmental regulators, PERC and SERF.

Despite protests from residents, the council approved in October SERF’s closure-expansion plan. Expansion entails filling the deep ditch with 450,000 cubic yards of incinerator ash.

The ditch is expected to have a lifespan of five years. By then the state should have opened its own special-waste landfill in eastern-central Maine.

Included in the council’s — and regulatory agencies’ — approval of the closure-expansion plan is a requirement that SERF dispose of leachate at a secondary treatment plant. Leachate is water that percolates through a mass of waste.

The Bangor City Council heard last week a SERF proposal to pipe leachate from Secure III into the city’s secondary treatment plant. The plant is being built and should be working in 1993.