MILLINOCKET, Maine — The Town Council wants to use regional funding to hire an economic development agent a day a week to promote economic development in the Katahdin region.
Councilors on Thursday agreed to pursue the idea with the Katahdin Area Recovery and Expansion, or KARE, committee, which is composed of leaders from East Millinocket, Medway and Millinocket.
The idea, Town Manager Eugene Conlogue said, would be to pay an agent from Eastern Maine Development Corp., and possibly a college student assistant, to help local businesses, fledgling businesses and others looking to move to the three towns
The agent would have about a six-month trial period. No time would be spent on economic development surveys or other nonessentials, Conlogue said, just work that would produce the most tangible results.
“We want a worker bee, not a drone,” Conlogue said.
The EMDC agent would be paid with a portion of the $75,000 that Brookfield Renewable Power Inc. pays Millinocket annually as compensation for the Brookfield-owned mill’s Sept. 2, 2008, shutdown. Conlogue estimated the amount would likely be $12,000 to $15,000.
A KARE subcommittee consisting of East Millinocket Selectman Mark Marston and Town Councilor David Cyr, among others, has signed off on the idea, Cyr said.
Eastern Maine Development Corp., the EMDC, is a nonprofit organization that has been providing assistance to businesses and community leaders for 40 years in the region, according to its Web site, emdc.org. The organization has been working with a core service territory of more than 15,000 square miles, six counties, and a population base of more than 324,000 people.
Millinocket also pays EMDC for economic development service on an as-needed basis.
The specter of the Millinocket Area Growth & Investment Council, the town’s last economic development agency, seemed to hang over the discussion. Millinocket’s funding of MAGIC, which ended in 2008, had been controversial since at least 2004.
A small group theorized that MAGIC was conspiring to depopulate the region and turn it into a tourist haven while seeding East Millinocket and Medway with manufacturing businesses — a charge that MAGIC, pro-MAGIC residents and several businesses have called preposterous.
Other criticisms of MAGIC included that it failed to return enough to Millinocket for what the town allocated and didn’t communicate well enough with the council. Council Chairman Scott Gonya indicated Thursday that these failings wouldn’t be tolerable this time around.
“If we get back into that boat again, I won’t be for it,” Gonya said.
Pressure on the council to set an economic direction is powerful.
There have been some encouraging signs recently, such as a biomass furnace operation having announced plans to open a factory in town in 2010, and the region’s first authorized ATV trail system set to open by 2012. The Katahdin region, however, has yet to fully recover from a paper mill shutdown that increased its unemployment and forced the decline of the town’s population from a little more than 8,000 people in the 1980s to fewer than 5,000 now.
Under the proposal Conlogue discussed Thursday, the KARE board would monitor the agent’s work and would use Brookfield money or grants to continue to fund the agent’s work or expand the agent’s hours to full time.