CANTON — Eighteen town residents approved a moratorium for solar farm projects in town without any questions or comments during a special town meeting at the Town Office on Thursday.

The moratorium of 180 days will allow time for the town’s planning board to “develop suitable regulations governing such facilities,” the meeting article stated.

Currently, there is one solar farm on Edmunds Road in Canton, but there are “at least three other possible (solar farms)” interested in having their businesses in town, Selectman Chair Brian Keene said at a board meeting in December.

“At this point, because we just put the moratorium in, all solar (farm projects) is on hold,” Keene said at Thursday’s meeting. However, the Edmunds Road solar farm project will move forward since it is already established, Keene said.

In other business, at the Select Board meeting following the special town meeting, the selectmen voted to partner with the Center for Ecology-Based Economy of Norway to seek grant money from the state’s Community Resilience Partnership program.

Claire McGlinchey of CEBE gave the selectmen an overview of the program, which began in 2022 to “help Mainers reduce their energy usage and become more resilient to some of this extreme weather we’ve been seeing, like that storm in December and other impacts of climate change,” McGlinchey said.

The partnership program provides about $50,000 in no-match grants to towns, which means that the towns don’t have to provide funding on their end, she said.

CEBE helps guide towns through the enrollment process, they take care of grant writing and gather estimates for the work that needs to be done, she added.

Eight Maine towns including Bethel, Casco, Hartford and Norway are listed as towns that have received grants from the program. The towns have used the grant funding to do works such as energy audits, installation of heat pumps and solar energy at their town offices, and to complete their streets for bike and pedestrian safety.

In other news, the selectmen approved a $7,000 donation to the town’s Fire Department from its Fire Department Auxiliary.

Auxiliary member Sherri Vaughan, the wife of Fire Chief Jason Vaughan, said that the money was raised from the auxiliary’s wreath festival and cornhole tournament, and will be used to purchase a traffic control trailer “and what they can fit in it.”

The wreath festival made $3,006 in sales this year and 88 wreaths were donated for the festival, Vaughan said.

Residents Robyn McClintock, Brian Jordan and Jody Larrivee were appointed to the Budget Committee for one-year terms during Thursday’s meeting. The committee has openings for two more members, the selectmen said.

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