Landowners on the Wiscasset side of Montsweag Brook continue to resist a proposal by the Chewonki Foundation to remove the Lower Montsweag Brook Dam, and new voices, including a candidate for selectman, are joining the fray.
Several residents showed up at a meeting of the Wiscasset Planning Board Monday night to protest the demolition. The residents thought the meeting would include a public hearing on the dam removal, but instead, according to Planning Board member Raymond Soule, “it was simply a preliminary hearing,” at which only the applicant – in this case, Chewonki – could speak.
After the meeting, the frustrated residents gathered outside the Municipal Building to discuss the project. Ed Polewarczyk, who serves on the Budget Committee and is running for selectman, wanted to ask the Planning Board a few questions.
“They’re trading a new habitat for the possibility of an old one,” Polewarczyk said. “I don’t know that you can ever go back.”
Removal of the dam will drain the impoundment, or pond, it created upon its construction by Maine Yankee in 1968. Residents complain that several species of fish, including a healthy population of bass that makes the pond a hidden treasure for local fishermen, have made the pond their home.
In an interview at the dam site Friday, Chewonki Foundation President Hudson addressed some of these concerns. “You’re going to lose the current recreational values,” he admitted, but opportunities for anglers will still exist. “You’ll just be fishing for different fish,” he said.
The impoundment “is not a very good place for any fish… nothing can live below five and a half feet due to lack of oxygen,” he said. He also noted “technically they weren’t allowed to fish [in the impoundment].” No Trespassing signs bearing the Maine Yankee name still warn visitors to keep out, but these will be a thing of the past as soon as the dam is. Chewonki plans to link the property to its Back River Trail and open it to the public.
Even as Hudson leads the battle for demolition, a letter to the Wiscasset Selectmen and Planning Board by Jeffery Ripley alleged misconduct on Hudson’s part in a related issue. In the letter, Ripley said Selectmen and Planning Board members “got the wagon before the horse concerning the Montsweag Brook Restoration Project.”
“I implore you to do your homework before you get yourselves caught up in serious litigation,” he said.
According to Ripley, Hudson and Chewonki “never bothered to confer or contact private land owners in order to trespass and cut upon these individuals properties.”
“Mr. Hudson owes this community and those land owners which I have made referrence [sic] to a supreme apology… those individuals should be reimbursed for their trees, trouble and time.”
In a separate letter to the Lincoln County News, Ripley said Hudson “firmly believes he’s beyond reproach for any thing [sic] he’s created… He’s been in bed with Maine Yankee for a long long time.”
“Both of those remain entirely repugnant to me, folks from Maine are invisable [sic] and of no significance to him,” Ripley said.
Hudson, in turn, said a surveyor made mistakes, but that the Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS), an agency of the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), hired the surveyor.
After the mistakes came to light, the Maine Forest Service convened a January meeting to resolve the issue. Surveyors “went back and located the proper boundary,” Hudson said, and he “left thinking we had resolved the problem.” The landowner in question made “no request for reimbursement,” Hudson said.
“It was an unfortunate thing that happened,” Hudson said.
Of Ripley’s allegations regarding Hudson’s relationship with Maine Yankee, Hudson said, “That’s really funny.”
Chewonki had a “prickly relationship with Maine Yankee until about ’92,” Hudson said.
Around that time, members of the Maine Yankee Environmental Committee came to Chewonki for help in dealing with Ospreys nesting on Maine Yankee’s yard crane.
“For the next two or three years I helped Maine Yankee deal with their Ospreys… rather than take a fee for my services I asked Maine Yankee to pay for an assistant to help me document the population of Ospreys in the area,” Hudson said.
In 1997 Governor Angus King chose Hudson to serve on the Community Advisory Panel for the Decommissioning of Maine Yankee, but Hudson said the appointment was a result of his unique knowledge as a local scientist, not any improper relationship with Maine Yankee.
“That’s the extent of my involvement,” Hudson said. “I don’t have any clandestine meetings after dark with Maine Yankee.”
In an e-mail to LCN, Hudson also responded to Ripley’s accusations regarding Hudson’s feelings about Mainers. “I’ve worked in Maine for the past 44 years. I got married in Maine. We’ve raised two children in Maine. I’m not sure I understand the nature of Mr. Ripley’s contention that somehow or another I am an agent of some outside – out of state – force.”
Hudson’s e-mail defends Chewonki’s long history of service to Maine. “No one loves this state and this region more than me! I am sad that I and Chewonki are so misunderstood. It tells me that we have a lot of work yet to do.”
Hudson’s apparent passion seems empty to Dale Skillin. Skillin’s parents own acreage on the Wiscasset side of the dam. In a phone interview Monday, Skillin said he attended the January meeting with Hudson and the Maine Forest Service. Before the meeting, Chewonki cut “a good 20-30 trees” on his family’s property, he said.
Of these, “half a dozen to a dozen were 20-30 years old.” It was the Hemlocks,” Skillin said. “The Hemlocks grow really slow.”
Skillin called the surveying errors “the most ridiculous thing that could ever have happened.” The area in question, he said, has been “my grandparents’ property as far back as 1920… those boundaries haven’t changed.”
“There was no reason other than their laziness to cut down any trees at all,” he said. Skillin said he didn’t pursue reimbursement because “I’m trying to work with them, not against them.” Nonetheless, he said Hudson apologized to his mother in February and “said he would make it right.”
That was the last Hudson said about it, Skillin said, and if something isn’t done soon, “I’ll have the forest service issue a summons,” he said.
“Cutting down 30-year-old trees did not sit well with me, did not sit well with my mother… she has lived there all her life,” Skillin said.
Even after the error was recognized and the boundaries moved, Skillin said the current placement remains unsatisfactory. “All [Hudson] has to do is read his own deeds… out of 19 [boundary markers] on my property, only one is real close.”
Skillin raised a variety of further concerns regarding the project. It’s unlikely, he said, that all the species Hudson predicts will return to the brook will indeed do so, or whether some of them lived in the brook in the first place.
“My grandfather worked that valley in the twenties and thirties,” Skillin said, and he told Skillin he never saw the alewives, blueback herring or brook trout Chewonki hopes to restore to the brook. The American eel, Skillin said, can already scale the dam, while, regardless of removal, rainbow smelt will rarely travel so far upstream. Essentially, Skillin said, Chewonki will destroy the habitat of 12 species in exchange for the return of one.
In addition to fish, Skillin said, the pond supports beaver, mink, otter and turtles. “There’s probably hundreds of turtles there,” he said.
Skillin questioned Maine Yankee’s right to ban landowners from fishing the pond. “The fish in that water belong to the people of Maine,” he said. “The average sportsman isn’t going to go out of his way to be unlawful, but he might go out of his way to demand his rights.”
“My grandfather always allowed people to go down to that brook,” Skillin said.
Skillin, like Ripley, made reference to a mysterious and inappropriate relationship between Hudson and Maine Yankee. “The real truth is Maine Yankee is scaring [Hudson],” Skillin said. Skillin was an employee of Maine Yankee “right until they closed,” he said.
“I have a real problem with people who don’t know what they’re doing making decisions for my town and my property,” Skillin said. “[Hudson] doesn’t realize how much we have protected that valley without him.”
For more on Chewonki and the Montsweag Brook Restoration Project, see “Chewonki $100,000 Closer to Completion of Montsweag Brook Project” in this issue.
The next step for the Wiscasset Planning Board is a site walk on June 2 at 2 p.m. The public is welcome to attend.
According to Town Planner Jeffrey Hinderliter, the board will meet at a small turnoff on the right hand side of Rt. 1 immediately before the Wiscasset/Woolwich town line. A path near the turnoff leads to the dam. For more information, contact the Wiscasset Town Hall at 882-8200.
