It may be legally correct for the Great Salt Bay Sanitary District Board of Trustees to dispose of district property as they see fit. While town fathers are required to buy or sell anything over a certain amount through the public bid process, entering only into those agreements most favorable to the town, public utility officials are under no such restriction.
So, legally they are within their rights to sell a two, no wait, 3.2-acre lot, to a private party with no appraisal, no public bid, no adjustment in price for almost doubling the proposed lot size at the last minute, and barely a public announcement.
At least the Damariscotta planning board put the brakes on the sale at least long enough to let the neighbors weigh in.
This deal is especially ironic because the sanitary district trustees have long fought to protect the interests of their 700 some customers with the zeal of rabid pit bills.
For years, before they changed their impact fee policy, the district officials would clobber any new use within their system with a prohibitive assessment, whether the new use was actually connected to the system or not.
The trustees rightly argued that new use brings more people to town, more people means more use; more use means a future expansion of the system for which they needed to prepare.
Of course, they never actually bothered to check whether a new use actually attracted more people to town. They just assumed it did and painted everyone with the same brush.
In 1999, when the district trustees pushed for redoing the water line down Damariscotta’s Main Street and extending it to Miles Memorial Hospital for fire safety purposes, they went to the Town of Damariscotta for the money, because, they argued, it would serve a public use and their customers could not be expected to pay for the expansion on their own.
In fact they even used a combination of federal grants and fee hikes to pay for the Storer property purchase in the first place.
So it seems strange that in this instance, when they actually have an opportunity to make a little money, a drop in the bucket compared to their operating costs surely, they couldn’t be bothered to seek out the best deal for their constituents.
Remember this because in the next year or so, the district will come back to its customers with a rate increase. They’ll say they hate to do it, and they will; they’ll feel the pain, but the budget is this, the Public Utilities Commission says that and the bottom line is their existence is going to cost you more money.
Just remember when you are looking at that bottom line in your bill, that when the district had an opportunity to at least symbolically lessen the pain if nothing else, they chose not to.
