BUCKSPORT, Maine — Now that the town’s largest employer has closed, change is looming large for Bucksport and the communities that immediately surround it.
They might have no power to reopen the Verso Paper mill — which is on the verge of being sold for $60 million to a metal recycling firm — but local officials and residents want to do what they can to help determine what Bucksport’s future might bring.
With that goal in mind, town officials have scheduled a community meeting from 4 p.m. to 6 p.m., Saturday, Jan. 10, at the local middle school. Chris Grindle, the town’s information technology coordinator and an organizer of the meeting, said Thursday that the forum will provide residents and municipal officials the opportunity to discuss ideas that resulted from an informal exit poll survey conducted during the Nov. 4 elections last fall.
Grindle said a wide variety of suggestions were made, but many residents indicated they wanted some sort of continued manufacturing presence at the 250-acre paper mill property, which sits between an active rail line and deepwater access to Penobscot Bay.
“There was a reoccuring theme that we need to redevelop the facility,” Grindle said. “[Local residents] realize that something has to happen” to boost the local economy.
The prospective buyer of the mill, AIM Development, purchased a former fire-damaged Verso mill in Sartell, Minnesota, and is in the process of redeveloping it. AIM Development has not indicated what its plans for the Bucksport property might be.
The closure of the sale by Verso to AIM Development is expected to occur after a Jan. 13 hearing on a lawsuit challenging the sale is held in federal court in Bangor, according to a Verso spokesman.
Members of the Bucksport Town Council are expected to attend and participate in Saturday’s community meeting, Grindle said.
“The council has received and will respond to inquiries related [to anything] from concerns about the mill to the possibilities of further developing the downtown district,” Grindle said in a prepared statement about the meeting.
