MILLINOCKET, Maine — With the town’s municipal and education budgets set for another year, the Town Council plans to turn its attention back to a goal councilors began pursuing late last year — the creation of a public electric utility, officials said Friday.

Town Manager Eugene Conlogue expects to finish by early next week a request for proposals to hire a consultant to provide explicit instructions on how to create such a utility, he said. Advertisements will be published in a statewide newspaper starting this weekend, he said.

Conlogue likely will discuss progress on this at the next council meeting on Thursday.

“We still have a desire to try to create in some form a public utility,” Councilor Michael Madore said Friday. “We don’t know if it would be for generating electricity or [just] distribution or somebody who would buy electricity wholesale. Right now we have more questions than answers, and we need to go ahead and hire a consultant who will point us in the direction we need to go.”

Given the Katahdin region’s need for greater industry and employment opportunities and the enticement provided by the lower electricity rates that public utilities generally charge, the council agreed to study the issue in November at Councilor Scott Gonya’s suggestion.

Millinocket already has hydropower dams and generation lines, and the proliferation of wind farms around the state is another factor. Lincoln officials also are informally discussing formation of a public electric utility.

Council efforts at creating the public utility went on hold as the long process of shaping the town’s budgets began in the spring, but several councilors visited a public utility, Madison Electric Works, and Backyard Farms of Madison in February. The utility offers electricity at 13 cents a kilowatt-hour, among Maine’s lowest rates, which drew Backyard Farms to move there.

Councilors said they would love to see low electricity rates entice a company like Backyard Farms to Millinocket. Backyard Farms employs 130 full-time workers at its 27-acre greenhouse, the largest building in New England. The company is building a second, 19-acre greenhouse for spring that will put about 175 workers on its payroll.

Gonya suggested using a $75,000 regional economic development payment, issued by an agreement with Brookfield Renewable Resources in the event of a mill shutdown, to help fund the public utility startup or research.

Though most of that money went to fund the construction of an all-purpose recreational bridge over the West Branch of the Penobscot River, that decision in no way indicated a decrease in interest in creating a public utility, Madore said.

“The goal is to find the best electricity rates for residents and businesses,” Madore said.

Madison has some resemblance to Millinocket. It has about 4,500 residents, sits on the Kennebec River and has a paper mill. As of 2007, Madison Paper Industries was listed as employing 260 people making catalog papers and paper for The New York Times Magazine.

Millinocket has about 5,000 residents and a paper mill, which, though temporarily shut down since September, employs about 150 people. It has an industrial park, a great deal of open space in and around it, electricity-generating dams on the Penobscot that might be used for wholesale power production, and several wind farms proposed or running nearby that could contribute electricity.

Another generation dam is due to move to Medway within four years as part of plans to build fish bypasses at three Penobscot dams in Howland and farther south.

Gonya and council Chairman Wallace Paul could not be reached for comment on Friday.

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