PIERCE POND TOWNSHIP – The Land Use Regulation Commission accepted a staff recommendation to deny a public hearing regarding a water pumping station in Pierce Pond Wednesday.

The commission received two letters requesting a public hearing after approving Poland Spring’s permit application in June.

“You knowingly and needlessly placed us in harm’s way and you did it in a very shameful way,” wrote Lexington resident Richard Levesque in a letter dated June 21.

He asserted that commissioners were on “auto-pilot” and did not give dissenters adequate attention.

Levesque and other residents along Long Falls Dam Road, the access road to the pumping station, formed Citizens for the Protection of Maine’s Groundwater at the end of May in response to the proposed pumping station.

The Lexington and Highland residents are concerned mainly with increased truck traffic along the road and accompanying safety factors.

They have also brought other issues to the forefront such as water quality, aquifer monitoring and effects on recreation and wildlife.

Levesque said he did a lot of work documenting what he calls road sag, which he attributes to trucks using the road. He says that the recently repaved road has sagged significantly more on the side used by loaded logging trucks. The trucks travel on the other side empty.

“It’s a pretty discouraging situation,” he said in a telephone interview Wednesday.

But further efforts have been taken to stop the station.

Lexington resident Jonathan Carter, acting for the citizens group, filed a lawsuit in Somerset County Court Friday, citing lack of a public hearing as its basis.

In a handwritten statement, Carter said that the commission “failed to address public concerns” and “disregarded relevant information on transportation impact, health and human safety in regards to raw sludge deposits within a mile of the wellhead, impact on local businesses, degradation of the natural environment within close proximity of the Bigelow Preserve and impact on recreational use of the surrounding area.”

“LURC has failed to carry out its mission to protect the interests of the citizens of the unorganized territory and has failed in its mission to protect the territory from potentially damaging impacts – environmental, social and economic,” he went on.

In a telephone interview Wednesday, Carter said, “It was the right thing to do.”

He likened the situation to a boat ramp proposal in an unorganized territory that would receive a public hearing.

In response to the possibility that the station could spur a bottling plant and desperately needed jobs in Somerset or Franklin counties, he said, “They shouldn’t have made a decision based on the possibility of future jobs.”

Catherine Carroll, director of the commission, could not comment Wednesday, saying that neither the attorney general nor the commission had received any papers from the court yet.

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