Various options for county municipal waste

By Stuart Hedstrom
Staff Writer

DOVER-FOXCROFT — The county commissioners tabled a decision on signing a contract with the Municipal Review Committee (MRC) for management and disposal of municipal solid waste after 2018, when its current agreement expires.

“Let’s bring it back in April,” said Commissioners Chair Fred Trask during the March 1 meeting.

County Manager Tom Lizotte said many of 187 MRC member communities will be making decisions in the near future on solid waste, with the Bangor City Council having signed the municipal joinder agreement the evening before. The MRC contract with the Penobscot Energy Recovery Company (PERC) in Orrington will end in 2018 and the organization intends for its members’ solid waste to go to a future facility in Hampden, operated by the Maryland-based Fiberight.

“The issue here is the technology Fiberight is proposing to use has not been proven on a large scale,” Lizotte said about the future waste-to-energy plant. He said the county is a very small player in the discussions with the unorganized territories resulting in about 250 tons of waste, compared to the hundreds of thousands of tons coming from the cities in Penobscot County.

“Everybody pretty much has to go in the same direction to make the tonnage work,” he said. “It would start in 2018 and the idea is this would continue for 20-plus years,” with the contract having an out clause in the event communities may want to go back to PERC or pursue a landfill option.

“We are members of the MRC and I think our duty is to stick together,” Lizotte said, saying there are financial incentives to sign the agreement by the May deadline compared to after the fact.

Greenville Town Manager John Simko said his community is looking into an option other than Fiberight or PERC as town officials have toured Exeter Agri-Cycle Energy (EAE) regarding the possible separation and shipping of organic waste. The EAE facility uses food scrap waste and cow manure to make methane to run an electrical turbine for power generation which is sold on the grid as green energy.

Simko said Greenville averages about 1,600 tons of waste, and non-organic materials would either be recycled or hauled to Norridgewock. “From that waste stream we want to pull out as much as we can, as we do that we control our destiny — we control our costs,” Simko said. He said these expenses could be less than retaining membership in MRC.

“We want to have as much control over our solid waste as we can,” Simko said, saying an arrangement with EAE is only in the discussion stages right now and may not come to fruition. “We would continue with PERC right up until can’t anymore.”

In other business, Lizotte said “The county commissioners did go over to Guilford with the sheriff’s department leadership to look at a couple of sites. The feedback I got was both of these sites are viable.”

County officials are looking into working space for sheriff’s department patrol officers. One possibility is leasing space at the town-owned former Guilford Primary School on High Street, and the other is a building on Hudson Avenue across the road from the post office.

Lizotte said since the Guilford trip, another possibility in Dover-Foxcroft has arisen that could be the home of not just patrol operations but also the sheriff’s department administrators. “Under any scenario we are looking at dispatch and the jail would stay here in Dover-Foxcroft,” he said.

The commissioners went into an executive session at the end of the meeting to further discuss the various real estate proposals.

Piscataquis County Economic Development Council Executive Director Chris Winstead told the commissioners that he has visited nearly all of the region’s select boards to gauge interest in a proposed countywide broadband Internet feasibility study. “Minus one community we have full support,” Winstead said, as he still has another session left on his tour.

At a future meeting, the commissioners will make a formal decision on pursuing the study, which if in place would help the county seek outside funding for technology improvements. The data could look at the potential broadband providers available, access speeds, household data, what infrastructure is available and what the possibilities for broadband are. Winstead said the study would include information specific to each participant.