Voters will decide during an election in April whether to join 29 other Maine municipalities in prohibiting the sale and use of synthetic pesticides in town.
The referendum question that voters will answer on April 3 is one of three aimed at settling major recent debates in the Hancock County town. Voters will also decide whether to approve an increase in the tuition the town pays George Stevens Academy and whether they support allocating $20,000 to pay the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to finish a study examining the feasibility of dredging Blue Hill Harbor.
If the insecticide ban is approved, Blue Hill would join Allagash, Brunswick, Castine, Portland, Rangeley, Southport, Waterboro and other Maine towns that have passed bans, according to the state’s Board of Pesticides Control.
The ban would prohibit the use of synthetic pesticides, including weed killers that contain glyphosate, such as RoundUp, fertilizer-pesticide combinations, and insecticides that contain imidacloprid, which can harm pollinating insects.
Pesticides-ban advocate Rick Traub said he hopes a supportive vote from Blue Hill residents encourages other Blue Hill Peninsula towns to follow suit.
“If we can begin to make Blue Hill a little bit healthier, hopefully it can carry over to other towns. We would like other towns to look at this and say, ‘Blue hill did it. So can we.’”
Under the proposed tuition increase at the private George Stevens Academy, Blue Hill and the six other nearby towns that send their high school students there would pay $300 per student for the 2020-21 school year on top of the state-mandated tuition they’ve traditionally paid. In Blue Hill, the increase would work out to a total of $37,500 for taxpayers.
George Stevens seeks the increase to close an expected budget gap because of a drop in its international student enrollment. That enrollment has fallen from 49 students two years ago to 31 this year who pay annual tuition of as much as $52,000 to study and stay on campus.
With the enrollment drop, the international student program now nets about an $800,000 surplus, compared with a $1.6 million surplus two years ago, academy officials said. The school has traditionally used the surplus from that program to balance its budget.
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, meanwhile, has intermittently studied whether to dredge the harbor since 2014. Selectmen have pushed for dredging the harbor to create a navigation channel that would make the harbor more accessible to lobstermen, recreational boaters and downtown businesses.
The harbor is wide, but most of the town end of it empties at low tide, leaving the town dock accessible to boats only at high tide — a handful of hours a day.
The referendum results will be released during a town meeting on April 4, town Administrative Assistant Shawna Ambrose said.