FORT KENT, Maine — A handful of residents along a 400-foot section of private road won’t have to plow snow this winter thanks to action taken at the regular council meeting Monday night.
The town and its contracted snow removal company have been maintaining a portion of Boucher Circle for decades, according to Town Manager Don Guimond.
The street runs in a circle leading from Highland Avenue and back. Most if it is owned by the town, but the southern end is on property owned by John Peters.
“We would be willing to deed the road over to the town with a quit-claim deed,” Peters told the council. “There’s going to come a time when the town will want that road and the next owner might not be so willing to deed it over.”
Instead, the council opted to treat the stretch of road as a turnaround, much like areas on several dead ends around Fort Kent where, in the winter, municipal and contracted snowplow drivers maintain a small area to turn their vehicles around.
Also at the meeting, council members heard a presentation by representatives of Maine Power Connection — an entity made up of Maine Public Service and Central Maine Power — on the feasibility of connecting northern Maine to the New England power grid for the purpose of establishing transmission lines with a carrying capacity large enough to handle the power supplied by a proposed wind farm in Aroostook County.
Such a move, according to Kay Rand, managing director with Bernstein Shur Government Solutions, would be greatly helped by Maine joining the New England states’ power consortium ISO-New England.
Membership to the group would come at a cost of $6.5 million a year to Maine Public Service ratepayers, but Rand said company officials are doing their best to assure those costs would be mitigated.
Rand made a similar presentation at business breakfasts at the University of Maine at Presque Isle on Tuesday and at the University of Maine at Fort Kent this morning. Another presentation is scheduled Thursday in Houlton.
Council members also heard from representatives of the PAWS Animal Welfare Society and agreed to consider donating a piece of municipal land for a shelter if a suitable location could be found.