MILLINOCKET, Maine — Millinocket leaders will hire a consultant to help develop the town’s economy, but it likely won’t be the Virginia-based economic development agent who told residents that they needed to improve their attitudes toward outsiders.
The Town Council voted 6-1 on Thursday to hire a consultant to hold town meeting forums and delve deeper into land ownership and use, to review school and municipal government structure, and explore economic development and municipal investments.
Councilors said that while the author of the nine-page letter that prompted the vote, CZB Associates of Alexandria, got many things right, councilors would prefer to hire someone from Maine who better understood state laws and Maine itself.
“It put down a pretty good framework for us to start,” Councilor Bryant Davis said of the letter. “I think looking for a grant to hire a consultant is a good way to go.”
“I think we could do this ourselves. We know what we need to do,” Councilor Jimmy Busque said.
In the letter released Jan. 12, CZB President Charles Buki said the town needs to increase taxes, reinvest in and beautify itself, consolidate schools, seek grants and create a regional economic development strategy based on public land and tourism. Such steps, Buki said, would in several years or decades reverse the town’s devastating job losses in the forest products industry.
Councilors said they saw nothing wrong with those ideas but found flaws in another recommendation: CZB’s idea that Millinocket lead regional efforts to reduce private land ownership from 94 percent statewide to 60 percent and turn Great Northern Paper Co. LLC lands to publicly-owned recreation areas.
Councilor Gilda Stratton said that part of GNP’s land is an industrial park on Katahdin Avenue, former home of GNP’s paper mill, and that she wanted that land to be developed industrially.
The town has invested $150,000 in grants in Millinocket Fabrication and Machine Inc. and Pelletier Manufacturing in an effort to help create new manufacturing jobs. A Katahdin region committee of leaders from East Millinocket, Medway and Millinocket also administers about $150,000 in economic development funds to region businesses annually.
Town Manager Peggy Daigle and councilors said that they favored a multipronged approach to development, one that encouraged all forms of economic development, not just tourism.
Workers from CZB visited Millinocket in late October and early November after contacting Daigle to offer the firm’s services as an economic analyst and planner. Reacting to a recent New York Times story on the town, Buki did the pro bono work to help Millinocket reassemble itself to face its declining and aging population and the loss of its primary economic driver — papermaking.
“You have to improve your attitude towards the outside world. And when you do that, investments might follow,” Buki said in the letter.