HOLLIS – About 20 Kingfield residents toured the Poland Spring Bottling plant in Hollis on Saturday in anticipation of a bottling plant that might come to their town.
Most rode a bus the two-plus hours to the York County facility to see how the renowned water gets from the ground to bottles to palettes loaded onto waiting trucks. Most everything, from the water to the plastic bottles is manufactured, on the premises – either by machine or Mother Nature. Participants saw the process from start to finish.
During the bus trip, residents discussed their feelings about the plant that could bring 200 jobs to the area.
Though Betsy Bachelder and her fianc Chad Emery hope to secure good-paying, secure jobs in the Kingfield plant, Bachelder is not without reservations.
“I’m concerned about uprooting the area. It is a family area but I think it’s a good thing for the area economically. I think it will bring more good than bad,” Bachelder said.
Former MBNA employee and current grant-writer, Donavan Gaston said she hopes Poland Spring will bring charitable donations to the area as her former employer did.
In answering her query, Tom Brennan, natural resource manager for the company, told her the Hollis plant donates upwards of $100,000 annually. The Poland plant gives away more than twice that, he said.
Gaston said she opposed the idea initially but changed her mind when she heard about the economic impact. But she, too, has concerns.
“The trucks are kind of a drag,” she said. “But they can’t be worse than the loggers coming from Canada,” who often use loud air brakes in front of her home at the intersection of Route 27 and West Kingfield Road. She said the noise is so loud, vibrations are cracking her house’s foundation.
Despite her concerns, she “really wants” the plant, she said.
Michael Kankainen, a forester and lifelong resident of Kingfield is a proponent of the plant.
“I’ve watched people starve and suffer and stay poor,” he said, likening the bottling plant to a mill. It’s a transition of the economy, he said.
Despite filling 160 tractor-trailers daily, the plant does not nearly meet demand for the company’s product, Hollis Plant Manager Bill Naples said. The Poland plant produces twice as much, he said.
Increased demand has compelled Poland Spring to increase the Hollis plant’s capacity once since it opened in 2000, and it is about to expand again, he said. The 510,000-square-foot plant will increase by more than 50 percent with a 300,000-square-foot expansion, he said.
The Hollis plant currently has eight production lines and employs 275 employees year-round with an additional 50 during the peak summer season. If Poland Spring builds a plant in Kingfield, it would start with two to four lines, with room for expansion, according to Brennan.
Visitors and tour guides donning paper bonnets, eye and ear protection watched as bottle pre-forms, later air-blown into full-sized bottles, were formed from plastic beads on an enclosed automated machine – one created 60 pre-forms every 7.5 seconds. The plant fabricates two billion pre-forms a year, half of which are filled in the Hollis facility.
Bottles ran on overhead conveyer belts so fast they were a blur. Machines were loud, but not intolerable, with a decibel level only slightly higher than that requiring ear protection for workers.
In the filling and labeling area, a slightly sickly, plastic odor permeated the air, but, otherwise,, the plant was clean with a cement floor that gleamed under bright factory lights.
“As you can see, not a bad place to work and pretty clean,” Naples pointed out.
On the ride home, Mark Robie, newest trustee of the Kingfield Water District, pondered the value of Kingfield’s natural resource. He thinks companies who pump water ought to pay a levy and figured 180 million gallons of water taxed at 5 cents per gallon would yield $9 million in the state’s coffers per year.
“It’s true they have a responsibility to their shareholders,” he said. “But we have a responsibility to our grandchildren not to give away our most precious resource.”
Comments are no longer available on this story