KINGFIELD – A Kingfield group will be collecting signatures in a petition drive that, if successful, would give residents a chance to vote on whether to put a six-month moratorium on applications for major industrial developments.
The petition drive was announced in a statement days after Poland Spring Water Co. representatives met with members of the Planning Board to discuss preliminary details of their proposed application to build a nearly $100 million water bottling facility in town.
Susan Mason said Wednesday that she hopes for a moratorium not because she’s against Poland Spring coming to town, but because she thinks Kingfield people need to clarify the town’s zoning ordinances before approving the bottler’s application. Mason is a member of the approximately 30-member group calling itself the Kingfield Citizens for Our Right to Vote.
Bill Gilmore, a Freeman Township resident and a member of the Kingfield Comprehensive Planning Committee, said Wednesday that the most recent version of the town’s comprehensive plan calls for the designation of specific industrial zones, which are currently not in the town zoning ordinance.
“Right now the existing ordinance (without designated industrial zones) is incompatible with what the comprehensive plan called for,” he said.
The Citizens for Our Right to Vote want townspeople to use a moratorium to decide where to place industrial zones, so that residents are the ones determining the location of industry, not developers like Poland Spring, Gilmore said.
“I’m certainly not anti-development and certainly not anti-Poland Spring, but I am of the mind that the community – all of it – should speak to the issue and accept it or reject it,” he said.
If the citizens group collects enough signatures, the town would hold a public hearing about the proposed moratorium, and then a special town meeting to vote on it, First Selectman John Dill said Wednesday. The group must get signatures equal to at least 10 percent of the residents who voted in the last gubernatorial election, or about 50.
If enough residents vote in favor of a moratorium, town boards would be unable to “accept for review any application for a major industrial development,'” for about six months, according to the proposed moratorium ordinance.
For Mason, the proposed moratorium would give townspeople “a voice to determine where industry goes and what it’s going to look like” in town, rather than having the location of big industrial plants “being dictated to them by a developer.” “This is about Kingfield people voting,” she said, “as opposed to being dictated to by any biased” entity.
Poland Spring’s plans to build a bottling plant in town may, or may not, be derailed by a successful moratorium drive, said Tom Brennan, natural resource manager for Nestle Waters North America, Poland Spring’s parent company. “It’s obviously a matter for the citizens of Kingfield to decide,” he said Wednesday. “I will say it does put our project at risk – pushing out six months before we can get our local applications in. That delay is problematic, but it’s certainly up to the citizens of Kingfield,” he said.
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