A cadre of Hancock County officials and residents testified on Monday in support of a bill they say is their last hope to save a pair of dams that local communities rely on for waterfront property values and recreation.
The bipartisan bill, L.D. 531, was introduced by Rep. Nina Milliken (D-Blue Hill) and would allow the four towns bordering two dammed water bodies to form quasi-municipal entities and assume ownership of the dams, which are at risk of being abandoned by their current owner, AIM Development USA.
The towns face a tight deadline. If they don’t take ownership before October 13, they risk the state greenlighting the company’s request to forfeit the dams.
If forfeiture occurs, state law would allow the company to open the dams and walk away, leaving crumbling structures and an expanse of mudflats in their wake. Locals have said this would devastate the communities and ecosystems that have flourished along the ponds for over a century, resulting in massive municipal revenue losses.
The proposed legislation is “the most viable option to prevent two critically important water bodies from being drained,” testified Orland select board member Gina Bushong on Monday.
The bill is the latest twist in a complex saga that kicked off last summer, when AIM first petitioned to forfeit ownership of the three dams on Toddy Pond and Alamoosook and Silver Lakes.
Full forfeiture has never occurred in Maine, and the vaguely phrased statute that outlines the process has left residents and officials in Bucksport, Blue Hill, Orland, Surry and Penobscot scrambling to figure out how to assume ownership.
Town officials say the process has been muddied by AIM’s murky answers to questions about the dams’ condition and maintenance needs and the company’s earlier refusal to enter transfer negotiations unless the towns signed a non-disclosure agreement.
After a blitz of town meetings earlier this winter, municipal officials met with Milliken, state Rep. Steven Bishop (R-Bucksport) and other lawmakers to craft L.D. 531 as a stopgap.
If it passes, the bill would allow the towns to create individual watershed management districts for Alamoosook Lake and Toddy Pond — the two dammed water bodies surrounded by hundreds of residential developments — and staff them with three trustees appointed by the bordering municipalities and two trustees elected by waterfront property owners.
The Alamoosook Lake district trustees would be initially appointed by Orland municipal officials and property owners because the lake sits within town limits, while the Toddy Pond district would include trustees appointed by officials from a number of surrounding towns, including Orland, Surry, Penobscot and Blue Hill. Board members would then conduct their own elections afterwards.
The districts would fund their budgets by levying taxes on waterfront property owners and through municipal contributions based on each town’s proportion of waterfront properties.
Local appetite
The formation of the districts ultimately hinges on the appetite of local residents, who would have to approve them through town-wide referendums. At the hearing on Monday, a handful of residents made their support clear; dozens more submitted written testimony.
“These ponds are crucial to the identity of the area,” testified Orland resident George Schelling, who said he has enjoyed them for decades despite not owning waterfront property himself. “They are here for all of us. They are not the exclusive enclave of wealthy people from away.”
Silver Lake is excluded from the bill because it’s uninhabited, bill sponsors said. Bishop, who also serves on Bucksport’s town council, told legislators on the Environment and Natural Resources Committee that the town is in the process of negotiating a potential takeover deal with two companies that rely on the lake’s water: Maine Water Company, which provides Bucksport’s drinking water supply, and a gas-fired power plant.
The lone opposition on Monday came from a resident critical of the funding mechanism that the bill would create, arguing that it unfairly burdens waterfront property owners with the dams’ open-ended price tags and gives the management districts significant power to levy fees, including placing liens on waterfront properties if owners miss a payment.
Officials do not yet have a clear picture of how much it would cost to maintain the dams.
Maine’s Dam Safety Program classifies all three dams as “high hazard,” meaning that if they fail human lives are at risk, and determined them to be in “unsatisfactory” condition and in need of extensive repairs.
AIM recently sent the towns documents that roughly outline the current state of the dams’ infrastructure, but they were buried in hundreds of pages of deed descriptions and other miscellaneous information that hampered their interpretation, according to Bushong, the Orland select board member.
Bushong told legislators on the Environment and Natural Resources Committee that the towns have incurred over $10,000 in legal fees trying to navigate the dam forfeiture process, and contracting engineers to inspect the dams will hike costs by another few thousand dollars. Yet officials say those expenses pale in comparison to the financial losses that the towns would incur if the dams were removed.
Surry select board chair Mary Allen said that her town would lose $400,000 in annual property taxes if Toddy Pond drops the eight feet it’s projected to without its dam, a deficit that would be transferred to the rest of the town’s residents.
The committee appeared receptive to the proposal on Monday, but has yet to schedule a work session. Since it was filed as an emergency bill, if it passes the full legislature it would take effect with the governor’s signature.
Maine’s abandonment statute
Immediately after the hearing for L.D. 531, the committee considered a separate measure that would make a small tweak to the overall dam abandonment statute.
Introduced by Milliken on behalf of the state Department of Environmental Protection, L.D. 62 would extend the dam forfeiture process and expand the DEP’s authority to require the forfeiting dam owner to share information on the condition of their dams.
It was crafted in response to the situation in Hancock County and would conceivably give towns more time to grapple with forfeiture and get information on the status of the dams.
Thinking of the 700 non-hydropower dams across the state, lawmakers encouraged Laura Paye, the DEP official who oversees Maine dams, to bring ideas for additional ownership accountability measures ahead of the bill’s work session.
Committee chair Sen. Denise Tepler (D-Sagadahoc) recommended that the department look into an amendment that would require the dam owner to repair both its overall infrastructure and any fish passways before abandoning it, while her co-chair implored the department to look for outside inspiration.
“This has the potential to really be precedent-setting legislation going forward that is going to affect so many communities,” said Rep. Victoria Doudera (D-Camden), who encouraged Paye and the committee to draw solutions from other states.
Mia Kannik, a dam safety official in Ohio who heads the board of the Association of State Dam Safety Officials, told The Maine Monitor that she had never heard of a dam forfeiture statute like Maine’s, explaining that most states have stronger accountability measures for both dam ownership and maintenance.
Without strengthening the state’s statute, committee member Rep. David Woodsome (R-Waterboro) predicted that the number of orphaned Maine dams could snowball.
“There’s going to be a major crisis down the road here with these old dams now,” Woodsome said. Corporate dam owners could continue “just unloading a huge liability onto someone else. I mean, is there anything we can do about that?”
