MILLINOCKET, Maine — A New Hampshire investor in two Katahdin region paper mills will meet with town leaders behind closed doors on Friday, officials said Thursday.
Town Council Chairman Richard Angotti Jr. declined to comment on the subject matter of the meeting with Cate Street Capital. It follows councilors’ 1½-hour executive session with Gov. Paul LePage ’s staff in Augusta on Wednesday.
“It is an ongoing negotiation and I cannot elaborate on what we have talked about because it has been in executive session,” Angotti said Thursday. “They [Cate Street] called Thursday to ask for a meeting. That’s all they said, that they’d like to come up and continue to talk to us.”
The executive session will begin at the town office at 12:30 p.m., said Angotti, who didn’t know whether councilors would hold a vote after the session ends.
A spokeswoman for Cate Street confirmed on May 20 that an industrial auctioneer would sell off equipment from the Katahdin Avenue paper mill site owned by Great Northern Paper Co. LLC, the company Cate Street formed when it bought the East Millinocket and Millinocket mills for $1 in 2011. The auctioneer’s website listed no auction date, but two other sites listed the auction as set for June 19.
Speculation about when construction would start on Cate Street’s proposed $140 million pellet mill and when the East Millinocket mill would restart has been intense since the mill shut down in January and 212 of its 256 workers were laid off on Feb. 6.
GNP owes Millinocket about $2.3 million and East Millinocket about $657,900 in delinquent property taxes for the 2013-14 fiscal year, which lapses June 30. Millinocket officials announced on May 27 that they had filed a lien seeking $2.24 million on May 21 and would seek the rest in a lien to be filed shortly. East Millinocket officials have said they are considering filing a lien.
The largest single taxpayer in East Millinocket and Millinocket, GNP owes at least $6.8 million in unpaid taxes and other debts, according to a liens listing at the Penobscot County Registry of Deeds.
Angotti disclosed the executive session on Friday after a two-hour meeting in which councilors worked to make $300,000 in budget cuts to help offset the expected loss in tax revenue caused by the loss of mill equipment on Katahdin Avenue.
Councilors were presented with about $261,000 in cuts, including one proposal to save about $58,000 by eliminating all town recreational offerings except the town outdoor swimming pool. The council could not agree to that proposal, allowing resident Jane McGillicuddy time to organize with several other residents an alternative way to fund recreation, Angotti said.
The $58,000 cut would be “hurting all the children in the community,” Angotti said.