FORT FAIRFIELD, Maine — While the boards of Aroostook County’s two main landfills continue to work on the terms of a proposed merger, there is still skepticism over the plan in Fort Fairfield and other communities served by the Tri-Community Landfill.
The boards of the Tri-Community Landfill and Presque Isle Landfill have been exploring the possibility of a merger for more than a year as part of regionalizing government services. In June, the organizations announced that they were pursuing such an agreement and hoped to have a finalized proposal for communities to vote on in early 2018.
To Robert Novak of Fort Fairfield, the merger talks have lacked transparency and left a lot of unanswered questions — as the quasi-governmental landfill organizations have cited confidentiality under state executive session rules in releasing little-to-no details to date.
“Why does the Tri-Community want to merge with Presque Isle’s landfill system?” Novak asked at the Oct. 18 Fort Fairfield town council meeting.
“How could merging with an inefficient and expensive system make a currently viable one better?” he asked, referring to the larger Presque Isle landfill as the more expensive one.
For instance, Novak said he wonders if a merger could end up raising the expenses of residents who use the Tri-Community Landfill in the event that trash currently going to that facility ends up going to Presque Isle’s landfill some 40 miles away.
Currently, Novak said he and other Fort Fairfield residents pay about $16 a month for garbage hauled to the Tri-Community Landfill, while Presque Isle residents pay upwards of $30.
Located in Fort Fairfield near the border with Limestone, the Tri-Community Landfill serves 32 Aroostook municipalities towns and has a board of representatives from its three largest member communities, Caribou, Fort Fairfield, and Limestone.
Overall, Novak said, he is skeptical about the merger process so far and the need for it.
“We do not want to be in the situation where we go to the car dealer to get a new Cadillac and then wake up the next morning with a God-awful hangover, car payment book in hand and a Ford Pinto sitting in the driveway.”
In August, the Caribou City Council voted to fire two of the city’s members on the Tri-Community Landfill board who had supported the merger, with council members also citing concerns about the process.
At the last Fort Fairfield council meeting, the town’s member of the landfill board, Stev Rogeski, said that he hoped the concerns of Novak and others will be addressed when the finalized proposal is made public in January.
“We’re under legal requirements right now,” Rogeski said of the merger process and lack of information that’s been released. “Because we’re in negotiations, the things we’re doing right now are not open to the public.”
Without specifying, Rogeski said that aspects of the potential merger are still being sorted out.
“We’re still waiting to see what they need, what we have, what they can offer and what we can offer,” he said. “We don’t have an official, absolute partnership agreement yet. We may come to the conclusion that it’s not a feasible thing to do. We haven’t made that decision.”
And he noted that the merger will ultimately have to be approved by Fort Fairfield and the other local communities.
“When it comes to decide whether or not to do this merger, it’s absolutely your decision,” Rogeski said.
