AUGUSTA – A compact disc holding a 1,600-page application for a proposed wind-energy farm in northern Franklin County was delivered to the state Monday.
Harley Lee, president of Endless Energy Corp. of Yarmouth, is “frantically” making more copies of the application for other interested parties, said Catherine Carroll, Land Use Regulation Commission director, on Monday.
Endless Energy and Edison Mission Group have teamed up as Maine Mountain Power to propose a $130 million project to erect 30 wind turbines atop Redington Pond Range and Black Nubble mountains, located about four miles west of Sugarloaf Mountain in the town of Carrabassett Valley.
Carroll said LURC staff will review the application for completeness prior to it being accepted for further consideration, including public hearings.
The commission’s staff and the Department of Environmental Protection staff, as well as others, have been working with Lee on the application for about seven years. Therefore, Carroll said, it is probably “pretty complete.”
Carroll said she didn’t know when the application will be delivered to the Franklin County commissioners’ office, Carrabassett Valley Town Office or the commission’s office in Rangeley.
Because of the strong level of public interest in the project, she expects that LURC will make the application available for public comment regardless of its completeness.
“It makes no sense not to share it,” she said.
Carroll said it was her guess that processing the application, including holding a series of public hearings, could take a year.
“We’ll see,” she said.
She also said she would like to see staff member Marcia Spencer-Famous work on the proposal full-time, but then the commission would have to find someone else to pick up her workload.
“We’ll sort it all out,” she said. “We absolutely want to give it a a careful review, a fair review. I’m very confident the staff will be able to handle it.”
The application will not go before the commission board until it’s ready for public hearings, she said.
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