LIVERMORE — Selectpersons Tuesday night, Sept. 12, approved a 5-year contract with Maine Waste to Energy [formerly Mid Maine Waste Action Corp.] of Auburn for waste removal from the Transfer Station.
The 5-year contract includes a first year fee of $84 per ton plus an annual adjustment of 2% minimum with a 4% cap, Chair Mark Chretien said.
The company also offered a 3-year contract with a first year fee of $87 per ton with 2% minimum increase and 4% cap annually, Chretien noted.
When asked, he said the town currently has a 5-year contract that needs to be renewed.
“Right now we are at just below $79 per ton,” he stated. “We are better off to go for five years.”
Selectperson Brett Deyling said those prices were good, a company he works with is at $90 to $92 per ton right now. “That contract is not bad,” he added.
“It is good to have somebody on the board who knows the prices,” Selectperson Scott Richmond said.
In old business, Richmond said he and Assistant Fire Chief Andrew Berry would be flying to Florida Sept. 26 to complete the final inspection on the new firetruck, which should be delivered mid-October.
In April 2022 voters approved purchasing a firetruck and financing up to $382,373 of its cost. A 10% increase was to occur in the truck’s price May 1, 2022, purchasing it before then would save about $70,000, Fire Chief Donald Castonguay said then.
Paving on the River Road will be done the last week of September, maybe a week earlier depending on the weather, Richmond shared.
In other business Deyling shared loon chick information in case calls came into the office about it.
“There was a group from Biodiversity Research Institute that took one of the loon chicks off Brettuns Pond and they are relocating it to a pond in central Massachusetts to hopefully expand the population of loons across New England,” Deyling said. “There are a bunch of ponds in Massachusetts, they sprayed DDT years ago and killed off everything. The loons never came back so they are taking loons from here and trying to introduce them into those waterways.”
It’s pretty successful, Deyling noted. “The survival rate is generally about the same as if the chicks were going to stay in their families here in Maine. They take them, raise them until the chicks would effectively be on their own anyway. They teach them how to fish, keep the chicks in pens and release them once they are ready.”
The assumption is that the loons will come back to those same ponds in Massachusetts the next year, Deyling said. The institute is actually looking for more chicks to relocate, he added.
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