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SOUTHWEST HARBOR—On Tuesday night, the town’s planning board said it would approve a subdivision plan next to a waste site conditional on the results of a soil pollution test, which will be presented by the subdivision applicant, Ben “Lee” Wooster, at a future date.
A six-acre landfill site abuts Worcester’s proposed 12-lot Trundy Farm subdivision on the Long Pond Road in Southwest Harbor.
The planning board’s decision came after a previous split vote about evaluating the soil on the property.
The proposed subdivision is owned by Worcester, who is also the planning board’s vice chair.
Worcester’s family owns Eastern Maine Recycling, which is a local transfer station. The family also owns the landfill on Long Pond Road, which is being monitored by the Maine Department of Environmental Protection. The subdivision is near both the Eastern Maine Recycling (EMR) facility and the Worcester landfill site.
Pollution from the landfill has been found in groundwater east and south of the site. The landfill has existed for almost 100 years. It was last used in the 1990s.
The application had previously been continued after some papers and information were missing from planning board members’ packets when it came time to do the finding of fact for the proposed subdivision.
The motion on Tuesday was “that the applicant has met all the performance standards, pending bringing us a pollution study that is acceptable to the planning board.”
One of the divisions of the board members focused on if the subdivision would add pollution to the area. Some said it would not because the pollution potentially already existed in the area. Others worried that the activity of building home foundations and so forth would disturb potentially polluted soil.
Another point of discussion was whether or not the board could put conditions on its approval if they determined that the project was compliant with the town’s land use ordinance as written.
“I think our charge is to administer the ordinance not to set up what we think is a good standard for environmental criteria,” one board member said, stressing that it is up to the Department of Environmental Protection to do so.
Others disagreed.
“Isn’t the point there to make sure that we’re protecting the public, and we’re talking about pollution?” board member Charlotte Gill asked.
Board member Priscilla Ksionzyk said, “We need to protect our town.”
“I just think that it’s common sense to proceed with caution,” Gill said. “I feel there are too many questions surrounding the subdivision, none of which are trivial at all. I don’t feel comfortable moving forward until more questions are answered.”
There has been no submitted soil testing on the site to show if the soil is polluted or not. That is not normally required of subdivision applications. However, this site’s location next to the Worcester landfill has sparked concerns. Worcester has said that any homes would be served by town water, not drilled wells.
As a condition of the approval, a soil test will be done by a state-certified soil scientist picked and paid for by Worcester.
Both planning board members Michael Levesque and Worcester declared a conflict of interest on the EMR final plan for that 12-lot subdivision. Levesque’s home is near to the site.
REMEDIAL ACTION GUIDELINES AND SOIL SAFETY LEVELS
Though there seemed to be confusion over what is considered safe soil for residences during the September 30 Southwest Harbor Planning Board meeting, the state does have remedial action guidelines (RAG) for contaminated soils which can be used as a benchmark for a soil’s safety.
According to Maine Department of Environmental Protection’s David L. Chapman, who is a hazardous materials specialist, who spoke to the Bar Harbor Story in 2023, “The RAGs are guidance and are non-enforceable, but we use the numbers to determine remedial strategy…. We usually approach any given site in terms of risk of exposure.”
Chapman is working on a brownfield site at the Mount Desert YMCA in Bar Harbor.
In the case of the YMCA, the multiple soil tests were looked at via four levels of RAG thresholds: residential, park user, commercial worker, and construction worker. The levels are listed in ascending order with residential being the lowest RAG threshold and construction worker being the highest.
LANDFILL CONCERNS
There has been a landfill in Southwest Harbor in between Long Pond and the Marshall Brook Road for almost as long as most people can remember. It began in the 1930s with an open burning dump that was used by the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) and then the town.
As regulations changed, the waste at the Worcester Landfill was sometimes burned, sometimes not. It included, according to former select board member James Vallette, sewage sludge, fiberglass from boat yards, lab waste from the Jackson Laboratory, and other municipal debris and demolition. Mount Desert and Bar Harbor both used the landfill, too, in the 1950s and 1960s.
Those uses were echoed by DEP representative Maine State Geologist Sean Dougherty as he updated the town on contaminants in the area during the August 26 select board meeting. Danielle Obery from the Maine Department of Environmental Protection also attended.
“We’re really responsible for and involved in contaminant releases to a property,” Dougherty said.
His division doesn’t cover land permitting or stormwater issues.
“But we can certainly talk about a landfill. Definitely our thing,” Dougherty said. “There is a component where there is some municipal wastewater sludge that also made its way into the landfill.”
According to Vallette, who serves on the Acadia Disposal District board, “The facility is converted to an attenuation landfill. Attenuation landfills are based on the ‘dilute and disperse’ model and have been phased out in most locations. It relies upon ‘natural processes’ to clean up pollution in soil and groundwater.”
The are two primary contaminated groundwater flow paths that are carrying contaminants off the landfill property. One is the overburdened soil and flows down past Marshall Brook and is detectable in a residential water supply. The state department has installed water treatment systems in those areas.
The other flow path is through the bedrock via two primary fracture sets toward other properties located along Marshall Brook.
“Marshall Brook is a primary tributary of Bass Harbor Marsh, which means that it is carrying landfill contaminants throughout the entire intertidal marsh and out into the ocean,” according to Craig Kesselheim.
Dougherty said that he couldn’t speak to the reasons why the site hadn’t been capped or why there hasn’t been more active reinforcement from the Maine DEP. The site is in the PFAS program and there are elevated forever chemicals in at least a couple of wells, he said. Methane in the area is not toxic, Dougherty said, and it becomes explosive before it reaches toxic levels. Though it was in two of the residential wells, he didn’t expect to see explosive levels.
Vallette said he believed past testing had shown that it was.
DISCUSSION OVER WHAT WAS ALLOWED TO BE INCLUDED IN THE PACKET
During the September 30 planning board meeting, there was discussion about whether Vallette should be allowed to submit information for the packet.
The meeting was advertised as a public meeting, so Vallette submitted a letter as well as read it into the record during the meeting. The letter was not included in the board’s packet of material, which one board member said she did not have a packet at all.
EARLIER MEETINGS
During public comment at an earlier September meeting, Vallette asked if the board members had read certain aspects of the documents, which he said that he sent to the town office and code enforcement officer by the August deadline for inclusion. That information was not received by the board.
Among the material submitted by Vallette at that earlier meeting were deed transfers and geology reports and discussion by federally recognized geologists Douglas Rissing and Nicholas Loizeaux, he said. Both men also have homes in the town.
Though the board continued the matter until September 30, it did a finding of fact on multiple items within the application at that earlier meeting, but skipped some items until it received the materials.
NEGATIVE EASEMENT
On September 25, 2025, Worcester filed a negative easement at the Hancock County Registry of Deeds.
“The ‘negative easement’ prohibits future property owners of the subdivision from testing the groundwater for pollution. It requires all future owners to obtain permission from Worcester Associates (the landfill owner) to install groundwater wells for any reason (which includes testing). Evidence already entered into the record shows that the groundwater beneath the subdivision is ‘very shallow’ (less than 10 feet below the surface). This leads to the strong potential that construction activities—such as road building, digging foundations, and installing water lines—will contact and disturb polluted soil,” Vallette’s letter to the planning board said.
“The Worcester Associates-EMR negative easement proves this property is contaminated. It is actionable information that requires further investigation by the town of issues related to Section O of the Land Use Ordinance. The monitoring well is still present as board members observed in the site visit earlier this month. The applicant has provided no records related to this monitoring well. To my knowledge, the planning board has made no effort to obtain records related to it,” Vallette wrote. “The planning board, as part of its due diligence, should request that the applicant provide any related records in their possession or a written statement about what the applicant can recall about this well and any test results, as well as any knowledge about the depth of groundwater in the subdivision. This investigation should include a search for town records related to the groundwater monitoring well that the Town of Southwest Harbor installed within the subdivision site. The town likely installed this well in the late 1970s/early 1980s.”
During the September 30 meeting, Worcester said, “Being that the negative easement has been brought up, I would like to explain why we did it.
“EMR is concerned. There’s no question that there has been a situation of contamination on Marshall Brook Road of some wells. I think being prudent, EMR chose to come up with mechanisms that would limit access to ground water so that it wasn’t duplicated on the Eastern side instead of the Western side. So, it, initially, and will continue to have a deed restriction placed in every deed that would not allow any future owner to drill a well for any purpose on those lots. That, however, has only limited impact. So we investigated and our attorneys came up with the mechanism of a negative easement. Why it’s called negative, I don’t know, but that’s its name. Essentially, what it does is that EMR conveyed to Worcester Associates, its neighbor, which does own the landfill, that, to ensure that that those individuals that are in there, that EMR could not sell the ability to capture water underneath—the groundwater underneath those lots. Worcester Associates owns them, and it was done as a precautionary measure, only because you can’t do that after the fact. And so we did it if only to prevent another situation from occurring, whether it’s there or not, and yes, Worcester Associates is not going to permit others to go in there and drill wells and so on for whatever purpose they want.”
CITIZEN’S PETITION
The planning board scheduled a public hearing for a related citizen’s petition for October 7. That petition calls for soil testing within a half-mile of the Worcester Associates landfill property prior to any land use.
The petition will be before the voters in the town, November 4. The select board will also hold a public hearing on the petition, which was signed by more than 120 voters.
LINKS TO LEARN MORE
Maine PFAS Tracker Maine Standards
Missing Documents Stall Southwest Harbor Subdivision Review Near Landfill Site
Proposed Development Near Worcester Landfill Sparks Petition, November Vote
For more information on brownfield sites and Superfund sites in Maine you can go to the State of Maine’s Department of Environmental Protection website.
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