A year of division Crystallizing 2003 through one small town’s battle with a giant multi-national corporation — and itself BY ALEX IRVINE

There’s no doubt about it: Harpswell is a contentious place. Its history is rife with secession movements and all manner of bitter local disagreements about typical small-town minutiae. This might have something to do with geography: People on Harpswell Neck see things differently from people on Orr’s Island, who in turn see things differently from people in Cundy’s Harbor.

In that way, it’s like a lot of Maine towns.

The latest question to drive a wedge into Harpswell is, of course, the Fairwinds proposal, under which the former Navy fuel depot, decommissioned years ago and acquired by the town in 1999, would be leased to a joint venture of Canadian pipeline company Transcanada and oil giant ConocoPhillips. The two companies would then put their combined $100 billion in assets to work building a liquefied natural gas regasification terminal at a cost of some $350 million.

In much the same way as the Penobscot/Passamaquoddy casino proposal that Maine voted down on November 4 (or the racino debate raging right now), Fairwinds has crystallized the issues facing Maine’s changing small towns and the state as a whole: the conflict between traditional resource-based occupations and heavy industry, the tense interaction between long-term residents and relative newcomers, and the slow decline of small towns. The Fairwinds story is about both fear of change and the embrace of it, and the willingness or reluctance to gamble that a large-scale change will be for the better. It’s a story that will be repeated in Maine, in different towns and with different outcomes, often in coming years.

Since the Fairwinds proposal was made public on September 18, the town of Harpswell has been embroiled in a bitter public argument, complete with name-calling and accusations of corruption, intimidation, and greed. What emerges from the story, though, is not so much any kind of clear evidence that parties involved have acted in bad faith as some telling lessons in the resentment bred when people are forced to take sides in an issue that involves tremendous risk.

Proponents of the Fairwinds project claim that it will revitalize the town with approximately 900 temporary and 50 permanent jobs, $8 million or more in lease fees every year, and widespread positive economic ripples. Opponents claim that it will destroy the groundfishery, turn Harpswell into a terrorist target, and open a wedge for further industrial development in a pristine area of Maine’s coast. If you tweak the numbers up by an order of magnitude or so and substitute crime and sprawl for fishing and terrorism, you have much the same argument as surrounded the casino proposal.

But where the casino was possibly the most discussed issue to grip Maine in the last 20 years, this tale of Harpswell’s 2003 has been little told. It begins more than a year before the bombshell announcement of September 18, and it offers some valuable object lessons for other Maine towns that will face similar issues in the future.

2002

In the late spring of 2002, a representative of Transcanada met with Harpswell Selectman Jim Knight for a tour of the 118-acre fuel-depot property. The rep "told me what their interest was and asked if the town would be receptive," says Knight, who suggested that he come back with a written proposal. He unlocked the property three or four other times during the course of that year so Transcanada scouts could look it over. Each time, he says, he sat in his truck while they wandered around, and then locked the gate again behind them.

Like everything else about Fairwinds, Knight’s early meetings with Transcanada have grown somewhat sinister in the retelling. Harpswell Anchor "man about town" Bill Millar’s version of Knight’s story, which he heard from somebody else, has Fuel Depot Committee chair Roberta Weil and her husband Gordon touring the property with Transcanada, and having to wait for Knight to arrive because only selectmen have keys to unlock the gate.

If true, this version points to what could only be called a cover up on the part of all parties, because Gordon Weil has repeatedly said in public that he first heard of Fairwinds in July of this year. Knight, for his own part, says that the story is "unfounded baloney."

That hasn’t stopped it from becoming a common refrain among people opposed to the project, including members of Fairplay for Harpswell, people on Web bulletin boards, and lobstermen protesting at Dolphin Wharf on December 12 — one of whom also told the Phoenix that Knight said he’d get a woman a job at Fairwinds if she’d drop her opposition.

Conspiracy or no, it seems reasonable to guess that Fairwinds was looking forward to a fairly straightforward negotiation, which is to say that like any other venture with 100 billion dollars behind it, Fairwinds was expecting to stroll into Harpswell with dollar bills dangling out of its pockets and a lease that people would sign as soon as they could find the dotted line.

What Fairwinds didn’t anticipate (or, if you subscribe to one of the many conspiracy theories circulating through Harpswell, what they were counting on) was the presence of Gordon Weil on the Harpswell Board of Selectmen.

MARCH, 2003

On March 18, Maine DEP project manager Wilkes Harper got a voicemail from one Brian Cervi, of the international consulting firm Ecology & Environment Inc. (E&E Inc.). On April 1, Cervi called again asking for documents related to Maine DEP’s investigations of the fuel-depot site. "As is standard practice," Harper writes in an email (he doesn’t give verbal interviews, which is an interesting policy for a public servant), "I inquired into Mr. Cervi’s interest in this project for the public record. Mr. Cervi informed me that he was working on behalf of a confidential client, and that the identity of his client could not be disclosed at this time. He also politely refused to divulge the nature of his interest in the site."

On March 24, Gordon Weil filed the paperwork to enter a special election to fill the empty seat on the Harpswell Board of Selectmen. The vacancy was the result of a resignation following a spat among town officials that also resulted in a turnover in the office of Town Manager.

Weil is chairman of the Weil Consulting Group, and before that served as Public Advocate, State Energy Director, and Commissioner of Business Regulation for the state of Maine. He has been a force in the New England energy industry for years, and in addition to his consulting work he operates Atlantic Transco, a company that in the words of its Web site "seeks to acquire and operate electric transmissions systems."

He has also been involved in natural-gas pipeline projects, both unsuccessful and successful, in Maine, and although his business is almost entirely dedicated to electricity buying and marketing, Weil believes that natural gas is "a good thing. I developed the first comprehensive state energy policy and I certainly think there’s a significant role for natural gas because it’s clean-burning relative to oil. I was very much an advocate of natural gas and having a gas pipeline in Maine, and I believe that having [the Maritimes and Northeast] pipeline has been beneficial. If it can compete economically it’s a very desirable part of our fuel mix in our state, and I don’t apologize for that."

Weil had served a previous term on the board of selectmen, from 1997 to 2000, and gave no indication that he was interested in the board again until March. The seat he fills is up for grabs again next year, and there is much speculation in town about why he decided to step back into town politics at this time, when it just so happened that consultants who turned out to work for energy companies were investigating the property that lies right across Route 123 from his house on Firehouse Road.

Weil’s wife Roberta, a former member of the state Public Utilities Commission in addition to her work on the Fuel Depot Committee, was also talking in April to the state Department of Environmental Protection about this new interest in the site.

"My wife and I do not discuss Fuel Depot Committee business," Weil says.

According to him, he ran for the board of selectmen because of popular demand. "There had been a great deal of conflict in the previous board prior to the elections of March," he said on December 16. "I got a considerable number of calls. I’d say I was called by 30 people, urging me to run on the grounds that I had experience." Weil points out that the two other selectmen had been on the job for a year and a week, respectively. The people who called him, he says, hoped that "I might exercise some calming influence on the situation so we wouldn’t have the kind of conflict we had before. And I had those calls from people on both sides of the issue that had divided the town previously. [Liquid natural gas (LNG)] never crossed my mind when I was running. I had no idea we would have this proposal and didn’t realize I’d be devoting this much time to being a selectman."

Weil’s story fits neatly in with Harpswell’s reputation as a place where people have trouble getting along, and he certainly does have more experience than the other selectmen. However, that hasn’t stopped people in Harpswell from wondering about the coincidences involved with the timing of his run.

JUNE

In a later telephone conversation with Brian Cervi, DEP’s Wilkes Harper again asked him about his interest in the fuel depot site. Cervi’s answer this time, as recounted in a June 6 email from Harper to his colleagues Denise Messier and Rob Hoey, was, depending on who you ask, either standard discretion or a baldfaced lie. "Brian has been hired by a ‘confidential’ client he cannot identify who is considering plans to develop the site," Harper wrote. "All Brian would share with me is that it may be developed into a playground/recreational type park."

Why did Brian Cervi lie to the DEP, saying that the development would be a playground when he knew otherwise? To hear Wilkes Harper tell it, he didn’t. "The word ‘may’ as used by Mr. Cervi," writes Harper, "was interpreted literally and did not convey to me any certainty of outcome. MEDEP’s concerns with respect to redevelopment, as stated in my memo of June 6, 2003, were summed up with the reminder that no development at the site can violate the terms of the restrictive covenant placed on the property."

This is marvelously polished political passive voice, but by October 29, when Harper writes Hoey and Messier that he has been in touch with Cervi again, and has spoken with Fuel Depot Committee member Lee Overall "to discuss the overall status of the project, and the proposed development of the site by ConocoPhillips," he must have known that Cervi hadn’t told him the truth back in June. Maybe the DEP is used to being misled by industrial concerns.

A message left on Cervi’s voicemail resulted in a phone call from a his colleague at E&E Inc. Michael Kane. "I’m just letting you know that we’re not going to give you a comment," he said before referring me to Peter Micciche, Fairwinds’ "stakeholder relations manager" and a 20-year employee of ConocoPhillips, most recently as a compliance advisor on transportation issues. "That’s where they’ve got us sending all questions about Harpswell."

"I don’t know Brian Cervi," Micciche responded when asked about this. "Without interviewing him, how do you know he didn’t have a second person looking at the site?"

Wait a minute. How many consultants would be working for two different people competing for the same site and why would the Phoenix be told to call Micciche?

"I don’t know what consultants do all the time," Micciche says. "Anything done here was on the up and up, fully accepted business practice."

He then argues that Cervi’s statement was true because "most of the property is going to be a park after the terminal’s built."

Which may be, but telling the DEP about the recreational part while leaving out the regasification-terminal part is, if not an outright lie, certainly a peculiar shading of a partial truth. It might legitimately be argued that this kind of misdirection, when Cervi could have just kept his mouth shut, calls into question the trustworthiness of the people working for the Fairwinds enterprise.

Unsurprisingly, Micciche doesn’t see it that way. "Nobody comes right out in public and says what they’re going to do. No one ever does, no one ever will, it’s not going to happen. Period."

This doesn’t really answer the question of why Cervi told a partial truth and concealed the rest. Still, when Micciche calls back the next morning after talking to Cervi and Harper (apparently Harper would give him a verbal interview), his characterization of the situation is unchanged.

"Anyone that views this as secret really has no business experience whatsoever," he says. "It’s the way it’s done."