HOWLAND, Maine — Town officials are working with the Penobscot River Restoration Trust to have about 70 cubic yards of wet fill removed from the Lagoon Lane site where the town seeks to eventually place its transfer station.
Town Manager William Lawrence said that the bark, tree trunks and other wood wastes need to be removed from the site. The town also has concerns about clay deposited at Lagoon Lane. Town officials have been working with trust officials, whose contractors placed the fill there as part of building the trust’s $3.2 million fish bypass on the former Howland tannery site, Board of Selectmen Chairman Glenn Brawn said.
“It sounds like it is going to get taken care of,” Brawn said Thursday.
Laura Rose Day, executive director of PRRT, said that her organization was committed to resolving the problem amicably. She described the problems as those that typically occur with large projects such as the bypass.
The spongy wet fill, Lawrence said, is probably impossible to build on.
“It is unacceptable material according to the amended easement agreement they had done. We want the material removed,” Lawrence said.
This is the second fill-removal issue since the restoration trust began preparing the ground for the bypass near the confluence of the Penobscot and Piscataquis rivers in December. With the first issue, town officials complained that the rocks, concrete, tree wastes and other bypass construction debris piled on the tannery site were an eyesore and would be hugely costly for the town to remove.
The restoration trust and its contractors agreed earlier this year to move fill from the tannery site to the town-owned Lagoon Lane site, plus several other places. The town also said it would plan to move the transfer site from the tannery area to Lagoon Lane.
Town officials declared the revitalization of the town-owned site a priority about five years ago. Once home to the town’s largest single employer, the property has been dormant since the 1990s despite its access to Route 155, Interstate 95 and the Piscataquis and Penobscot rivers.
The bypass is due to be finished by fall. It is part of the Penobscot River Restoration Trust’s plan to open nearly 1,000 miles of habitat to endangered Atlantic salmon, sturgeon, American shad, alewives and seven other species of migratory, sea-run fish once largely blocked from going past Howland. Those species help support other commercially important species, such as cod and lobster.