A year of division (continued) BY ALEX IRVINE

DECEMBER

On December 4, Weil and the other selectmen canceled the January 16 vote on the Fairwinds lease agreement, alleging that the companies had inserted language in the lease contrary to the position arrived at in negotiations. "A commercial deal is about money, but this is not a commercial deal," Weil said at the time. "It’s about the character of Harpswell, and we can’t compromise that."

Not everyone in Harpswell is buying into Weil’s sudden change of heart. At the rally on Dolphin Wharf, two men who didn’t want their names publicized suggested that the whole argument was staged. "It’s all a setup," one of them said. "Weil’s going to look like he cares about the town, and then after he gets this project done he’s going to sell out and move to a Caribbean island."

Told of this comment on December 16, Weil said, "It’s wonderful what people’s imaginations will do."

Peter Micciche has moderated some of his more pessimistic comments from the December 4 meeting, after which he warned that time was running out before one of the other projects proposed for New England and the Maritimes got the go-ahead, at which point Fairwinds would go belly-up. Fairwinds looked at 37 sites in Maine before settling on Harpswell, he says, and in meetings with surrounding towns since the announcement of the proposal, "I’ve had several of them say that if things don’t work out in Harpswell, they’d like us to look at their town." One neighboring town even suggested a parcel of land that would avoid some of the headaches he’s experiencing in Harpswell.

So why hasn’t Fairwinds thrown in the towel?

"We’re committed to this as the best site," Micciche says. "We think it’s the best location for pipeline access and a deep-water harbor, and for previous use. We don’t have to go into a new site and take down a bunch of trees and drastically change the terrain."

Coming from the "stakeholder relations manager" of an energy venture, this last bit sounds a little self-serving, but ConocoPhillips has one of the better environmental reputations in the oil industry. Granted, this isn’t saying much; on the other hand, the only other explanation that presents itself is pure self-interest, and if it is somehow in Fairwinds’ best interest to go through a lengthy debate with a town and its government when they could have bought a private parcel with no questions asked and gone straight into the permitting process, nobody is sure how.

Chris Duval, spokesman for FairPlay, spoke at the East Coast LNG conference on December 10, and he reported that most of the people he talked to — all of whom worked in the industry — said that Harpswell was "a ridiculous place to put a regasification facility."

Richard Gibbs, of the long-gone Gibbs Oil Company that wanted to build a refinery in Sanford 30 years ago, agrees. He’s still involved in the industry as owner of an energy logistics company called Enermatrix, and he’s "been following very carefully your gas situation up there in Maine. Frankly, if you used Portland Harbor, the logistics and the physical arrangement make a lot more sense," avoiding the intrusion into a relatively pristine area of the coast and operating with equal if not better proximity to the pipeline system.

Opinions like these fuel the fires of conspiracy. If it’s so hard, the thinking goes, they wouldn’t stick it out unless there was some kind of benefit they’re not telling us about.

On the phone December 16, Gordon Weil seemed well aware of the various conspiracy theories circulating through the town, and summarized his take on the conflict-of-interest question thus: "Even people who claim that I had a conflict don’t think that somehow I was lining my pockets by being involved with the project, or dealing with the project rather, but because I was in the energy business in general, I would be sympathetic to entities in the energy business. I see this really in the reverse sense. My obligation is to the town, not to my business. By virtue of my being in the energy business, I am able to help the town, work for the town, more effectively, because I’m used to negotiating significant contracts with large entities."

"Other people than me," Weil went on, "can make a judgment at the end of the day whether my efforts and the efforts of the other two selectmen are acceptable or not. But I do believe I’ve brought value to the representation of the town based upon my experience rather than being corrupted by my experience."

As Weil says, other people will ultimately judge his service to the town of Harpswell. For now, though, it is abundantly clear that his ideas about what constitutes the best service to the town are filtered through a lens of cronyism and a lifetime spent in the energy business. There are certainly law firms and consulting companies in the US that specialize in representing municipalities in corporate negotiations, but those people aren’t the people that Gordon Weil has been working with for the past 20 years. On this count, at least, Weil’s critics are more convincing than he is. A half-hour telephone conversation with him is full of references to FERC, when FERC is irrelevant until and unless the town decides to go ahead with the project, and at several points he speaks of himself as "involved in this project" before catching himself and rephrasing.

Interviewed two days later, with the town’s other selectmen, Lee Theberge and Jim Knight, Weil reiterates his position that his energy experience has benefited the town in its negotiations. Knight and Theberge, who both supported another candidate for the seat Weil won, say that the three of them have "worked together well" and that they’re glad to have him on the board.

Greg Williams suggests that Weil’s presence on the board has changed the negotiating process. "To the extent the venture thought they were coming to Harpswell — and I’m not saying they thought this — and just rolling over the town by just offering them a whole bunch of money, I think they found out that it’s not playing out that way."

From the other side of the table, Peter Micciche also gives full marks to the town’s representation. "They’ve got some expertise, I’ll tell you that," he says. "We stepped in with something that we thought would be a relatively simple negotiation process, and with the help of the selectmen, specifically Gordon Weil, they’ve certainly represented the town very well."

Selectman Lee Theberge boils the perception of Weil down to its essence: "He’s been one son-of-a-bitch of a negotiator. He doesn’t go easy on any of ’em."

This is easy to believe. During the first five minutes of the group interview, Weil accuses me of two separate ethics breaches and suggests the Phoenix is out to smear him. The source of his anger? The same anonymous questions about possible conflicts of interest he’d treated with such urbane good humor over the phone. In person, Weil comes across as arrogant, not especially thick-skinned, and subtle when he chooses to be — although he rarely makes that choice. There’s a streak of the theatrical in him, as when he abruptly offers to leave the room so the other two selectmen can talk about his work on the Fairwinds lease without him around.

The selectmen have a rigid policy of only discussing Fairwinds business when all three of them are present — "to make sure we were not misquoted individually," according to Jim Knight — so Weil’s offer has the effect of demonstrating just what a dominant figure he is among them. Knight suggests that Weil change his mind, not because of any stated concern with the policy but because, he says, pointing to me, "Then you’ve got your coup."

The whole scene seemed almost rehearsed, because the proposal was based on the nonsensical proposition that, if Theberge and Knight had reservations about Weil but were afraid to tell him to his face, they would happily list them for a reporter while he waited on the other side of the door. In any case, Weil didn’t leave, and the Phoenix is unable to claim the coup of getting the Harpswell selectmen to contravene their media-access policy.

This missed opportunity is somewhat salved by the experience of watching Weil boil over while claiming, in direct contradiction of what he’d said two days before about accusations that he was either corrupt or simply biased, that nobody had ever accused him of anything. "As a consultant," he said, "you’re successful, you make a good living, if you have integrity."

It seems he’s never heard of Lee Atwater.

2004

So when is it enough? When does everybody pick up their toys and go home?

"That’s up to the venture," Williams says. "This is a business proposal; they’re entitled to make it."

Are they? Williams seems taken aback by the suggestion that the selectmen would simply tell Fairwinds to buzz off. "I suppose they could do that," Williams says, but he thinks it is "incumbent upon the selectmen to at least take it seriously, and ultimately put it to a vote."

The selectmen themselves agree. They deny having any regrets about bringing the proposal up, and they seem indifferent to the cloud of rancorous dust it has raised. "If somebody comes to us and offers us money," says Gordon Weil, "we do not have the right to turn it down."

Well, actually, they do. The selectmen are under no obligation to consider Fairwinds. They are in charge of determining what’s best for the town, and in this case they’ve determined that the town should vote on the proposal.

Part of this is the money, but another reason is that the property is something of an albatross: a former fuel depot with a contaminated well and soil, a few boarded-up buildings, and a decrepit jetty. Soil remediation has made it safe for people to walk their dogs there, but it’s a brownfield with uncomfortable insurance costs. Most of the people in Harpswell who don’t walk dogs on the property can’t wait to be rid of it.

"I wish we’d never taken it," says the guy behind the counter at Watson’s. "I knew it was going to be trouble."

Also there’s the fact that Fairwinds is promising $8 million per year, with assorted add-ons including a fisheries mitigation program, help in acquiring firefighting equipment, et cetera. The terminal would operate for 50 years — probably with a clause giving the town an option to extend operations beyond that — adding up to a big pile of money.

Of course, Fairwinds could also pull a Maine Yankee and skip town. "Our job is to build provisions into the lease to prevent them from doing that," Weil said, and to "develop a lease that reduces or eliminates the impact" of the terminal leaving at the end of its lease.

Williams also highlights protection of the town as one of his primary concerns in the lease. "Regardless of how big the enterprise is, you have to ensure that they can’t utilize bankruptcy laws or that kind of thing to avoid the obligation" to restore the site or fulfill the terms of the lease.

The trouble is, just about every big facility that is shut down or abandoned years ahead of schedule had similar provisions in its legal agreements. Just ask the city of Indianapolis, which ponied up millions of dollars in tax breaks and other incentives to land a United Airlines maintenance facility that United walked away from years early because of bankruptcy.

On this topic, the selectmen’s response is a collective shrug. All they will say is that the town will be protected in the lease.

Weil and Knight do point out an important difference between Fairwinds and Maine Yankee. The overwhelming majority of the money Wiscasset got from Maine Yankee came from taxes, which can’t be put in the bank. Leasing fees can, and according to Weil, if the town takes care of the money, its property taxes would be reduced by more than 50 percent "in perpetuity." He has put together a sheet of figures that projects the "total of annual payments" over 50 years to be an astonishing $1.96 billion.

This best-case (read: wildly optimistic) scenario must be balanced against, among other things, the realization that property values in the immediate area will take a hit. The only person in Harpswell who does not believe this is Peter Micciche, who insists that Fairwinds will increase property values, on the evidence that they "increased exponentially" during the period the Navy depot was operating. This proves, he argues, that people didn’t mind living next to the fuel depot and won’t mind living next to Fairwinds.

There’s a difference between buying in an area where an industry already exists and being in an area when an industry comes in, though. Isn’t there? Micciche points to cases "where property values have increased dramatically because of the availability of employment in the area," while acknowledging "places where they dropped because someone doesn’t want to live next to a particular plant," but he believes this won’t happen around Fairwinds because Fairwinds will be "relatively benign" compared to the Navy depot.

Micciche has read books on the history of Harpswell, and by way of suggesting that the Fairwinds debate isn’t much out of the ordinary, he likes to point out that Harpswell has a history of acrimonious debates. "It’s not a multinational corporation waving dollars" that has caused the fissures in Harpswell, he says. "It’s the nature of this town."

The nature of the town is what’s at stake, though, at least to Fairwinds opponents. Supporters of the project take a more dollars-and-cents view of the situation, as does Micciche.

He mentions the recent decision of Bass to close down its Maine operations. "In the five months I’ve been here I’ve watched a lot of companies leaving Maine," he says. "That ‘Vacationland’ statement on the license plates might be more fitting than ever if folks aren’t willing to share their state with some industry. People have to work. We need the energy, we need the jobs, and we need to fit in the environments where we are."

"I think in order for the town to move on with its normal business, it would be better for the vote to happen before the town meeting" in March. With the vote over, the town could begin "moving toward healing the divisions of the vote."

Unlike Tom Tureen and Erin Lehane, who split Maine for vacation on the day after the casino vote, leaving angry and disappointed tribal representatives to say some things they probably wish they hadn’t, Micciche says he’s going to stay in Harpswell for at least a couple of weeks no matter which way the vote goes.

"I’m not going to leave town the day after the vote," he says. "I definitely want to stick around and show the people of Harpswell what we’re made of. I think there’s going to be healing that needs to be done, and I want to be a part of it."

If the vote is successful, Micciche will be staying on at least through the terminal’s permitting process — expected to take two years — and possibly into its operational phase. He also wants to sit down and "study what happened, try to understand where the socioeconomic divisions in this town are and how they function." This uncertain situation is frustrating for him personally as well as professionally.

Micciche is the lightning rod. "I won’t say that this is a role I wouldn’t take again." he says, but his Fairwinds work "has been significantly different" than the previous 20 years he’s spent with ConocoPhillips and its predecessors.

A tone of fatigue creeps into his voice when he talks about being away from home. "I’ve met some really incredible people in Harpswell," he says, who have made him feel "as at home as possible," but at the same time, "You’ve got your life at home on hold. It’s stressful. If this is going to be my home, I’d like to know that and get settled down."

If the professional public smile of Fairwinds is feeling this beaten down by the process, imagine what it’s been like for the rest of the town. Whether they’re for Fairwinds or against it, nobody in Harpswell wants the town’s 2004 to look anything like its exhausting and contentious 2003.

How a small Maine town might avoid being torn asunder by a multinational corporation is a lesson many around the state would like to learn.

Alex Irvine can be reached at airvine@phx.com