KINGFIELD – Trustees of the Kingfield Water District met Monday night with a lawyer and a geologist to discuss legal issues that might arise if Poland Spring Water opens a bottling plant in Kingfield.
Few people attended the public meeting, and most were members of the town Planning Board. Lawyer Greg Cunningham of Bernstein, Shur, Sawyer and Nelson of Portland, and geologist Keith Taylor of Stratex LLC of Portland, addressed questions relating to a potential bottling operation. Questions topics ranged from the type of testing that should be done on the aquifer before moving forward, to the types of ordinances the town might put in place to protect the water supply if the company chooses to open a plant in the area.
Water District Chairman Bob Barnes expressed his gratitude for the professional input Cunningham and Nelson provided, saying, “What the five of us here know about this issue could fit into a cup.”
According to Cunningham, while Maine tightly regulates the use of surface water by both private citizens and corporations, the laws pertaining to the use of groundwater are vague. As long as use of groundwater does not directly harm neighboring properties, water users have control over how they use the water source, Cunningham said.
The law would not, in effect, prevent incoming corporations from overusing the town’s water supply in the long run, he said.
According to Cunningham, the best way to prevent overuse would be to put ordinances in place limiting the amount of water taken from the aquifer at any given time.
Poland Spring intends to use up to 1 percent of the water in the aquifer that can safely be taken without harming the water supply, according to Taylor, the Portland-based geologist.
“My gut feeling is that there’s a tremendous amount of water in this aquifer,” Taylor said, and that considering its size, it is unlikely that either Poland Spring or the Kingfield Water District “will be pumping enough water to damage the aquifer.”
Barnes noted that Kingfield is “literally sitting on a gold mine.”
Jim McClure noted that an important next step for the trustees would be to “determine what steps we should take,” and the trustees asked Taylor and Cunningham to come up with a list of possible actions to be taken.
In other trustees business, Barnes was re-elected chairman of the trustees, and Joseph Ray was elected clerk. The board voted to change its meeting time from the second Monday of each month to the first, to avoid conflicts with Planning Board meetings.
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