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| Brewer Considered for Pipeline Boost
BREWER — A natural gas consortium spokesman has confirmed plans for three additional compression stations, one of which may be located in Brewer. According to Maritimes & Northeast Pipeline spokesman Marylee Hanley, undisclosed parcels of land in Brewer, Waldo and Gorham are being eyed as possible sites for three compression stations proposed as the consortium’s fourth phase of construction in Maine.Compression stations boost pressure in a pipeline. Maritimes and its Canadian affiliate transport natural gas from near Sable Island, off the cost of Nova Scotia, through New Brunswick to energy markets in Atlantic Canada and the northeastern United States. The $3 billion pipeline Maritimes built two years ago stretches from Nova Scotia to Boston. Hanley said Maritimes officials have met with municipal officials in those three communities, but do not expect to begin notifying potentially affected property owners until it has completed the site selection process. Hanley said Tuesday that the consortium still is involved in engineering and system design studies to determine the best location for each plant. She cautioned a shift of even a few miles up or down the pipeline could place one or more of the proposed plant sites into nearby municipalities. Maritimes’ current plan is to submit applications for the plants with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission by Dec. 1, though that date is tentative, Hanley said. Public hearings would have to be held as part of the application process, she said. The three proposed stations would bring the total in Maine to five. Maritimes, owned by a group of energy companies, already has two compression stations in Maine. One is in the Washington County town of Baileyville and the other is in Richmond, in Sagadahoc County. Though not a big generator of jobs — the Baileyville plant has only two full-time employees and is monitored via remote control from Houston, Texas — a compression plant in Brewer could add significantly to the city’s tax base. If the plant is valued at $25 million to $35 million, as some project officials have suggested to city staff, it would yield between $610,000 and $830,000 in new property tax revenue annually, according to Economic Development Director Drew Sachs. That, City Manager Stephen Bost said, would be welcome news in Brewer, where city officials have been struggling to rein in their tax rate, now at $24.38 per $1,000 in property valuation. “It means a major infusion of tax revenue to the city,” Bost said Tuesday. “From our perspective, there is no downside. If they follow through on their project and locate the facility where we have suggested, it would have no adverse effect on our residential areas.” Bost declined to disclose the specific location city officials recommended as a possible site for the plant. Hanley said compression facilities usually are built on large tracts of land in order to maintain a buffer between the plants, some of which reportedly emit a noise some have described as a hum, and surrounding developed areas. According to Bost and Sachs, Maritimes is not a nonprofit organization and as such would pay taxes at the regular rate. Sachs said the plant, if built, would boost Brewer’s total valuation by 5 percent from the current $451 million. The two city officials said that as far as they knew Tuesday, Maritimes did not plan to request city assistance in the form of tax-increment financing. A similar plant in Baileyville completed two years ago at an estimated value of $23 million generates about $375,000 a year in tax revenue, based on that town’s current tax rate. Though the Richmond plant had been the source of noise concerns when it was the subject of public hearings, Baileyville Town Manager Jack Clukey said Tuesday that the Baileyville facility drew “quite a lot of support,” largely due to its effect on the community’s tax base. “We’re in a situation in this area where we’ve had problems with losing jobs at some of our mills,” Clukey said, among them a chip- and sawmill that has been shut down for about a year now. Clukey said noise has not been an issue in Baileyville because the compression facilities there were built on land at least a mile from residential areas. He added that local officials who visited a compression station at Maritimes’ invitation before the local one was built observed that while the noise was loud inside and close to the plant when its two turbines were cranked up, sound levels dropped significantly as the visitors walked away from the facility. Maritimes is owned by affiliates of Duke Energy, Westcoast Energy Inc., ExxonMobil and Emera Inc. This is a copyright article written by Dawn Gagnon of the NEWS Staff that appeared in the Bangor Daily News, Wednesday, September 19, 2001. Brewer Economic Development Office
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