HOWLAND, Maine — The Board of Selectmen will hold a special meeting on Monday to decide whether to hire a Brewer firm to help the town get environmental permits to remove fill from the former tannery site, officials said Friday.
The meeting will be held at 6 p.m. at the town office, interim Town Manager Peggy Daigle said. It will occur six days after residents voted 29-10 during another special meeting to approve moving the transfer station and as much as 25,000 cubic yards of fill from the town-owned site to the water treatment plant on Lagoon Lane.
CES Inc. is in line for the work, which Daigle said could cost as much as $35,000 in town reserve funds. Its website advertises the company as an engineering, environmental science and surveying company that employs more than 75 people. It offers a dozen specific services, including civil and structural engineering, transportation planning, planning and economic development, and municipal, state and federal permitting.
The meeting date and lack of competitive bidding for the work underline the urgency the project carries and selectmen’s comfort with the company, board Chairman Glenn Brawn said.
“It could come down to the rest of the board wanting to broaden our search [and seek competitive bids], but we do have a good history with CES,” Brawn said Friday.
Since winter, the Penobscot River Restoration Trust has been overseeing construction of a $3.2 million fish bypass on property adjacent to the Penobscot and Piscataquis rivers and the tannery site. Selectmen became concerned in early April that too much fill was being left on the site for the town to clean up. An agreement with the Penobscot River Restoration Trust and the May 25 vote cleared the way to allow construction crews employed by the restoration trust to begin moving the fill to Lagoon Lane next week, Daigle said.
Town officials have worked for years to revitalize the tannery site, once home to the town’s biggest employer and deemed a good parcel to develop with its proximity to several state roads. Besides eliminating an eyesore and a potential hazard, the fill removal will allow the town to finish preparing the site for development and to market it aggressively, officials said.
If it gets the job, CES will handle the town’s application to the Maine Department of Environmental Protection for a beneficial use permit and the town’s plan to move the transfer station within the next two years.
DEP grants beneficial use permits for secondary materials, such as fill, if it is acceptable substitute for the material it is replacing and will not “pollute any waters of the state, contaminate the ambient air, constitute a hazard to health or welfare or create a nuisance,” according to Maine State Solid Waste Management rules.
Selectmen also will decide whether to authorize the hiring of a bulldozer crew to spread the fill on the Lagoon Lane site. The work is expected to take two or three weeks.