MAINE

Range ponds/Poland Spring deal brings criticism
BY MARY LOU WENDELL
Staff Writer

Just below the earth's surface in Poland lies a spring-water gold mine that earns millions of dollars for private business every year.

Now, after several years of negotiation, the state is about to divert some of that money for public good. But the deal hasn't been clean cut.

Officials from the Bureau of Parks and Lands are on the brink of signing an unprecedented agreement that will allow Poland Spring Bottling Co. to extract up to 245 million gallons a year from its neighbor, Range Ponds State Park.

In exchange, Poland Spring will pay for $425,000 in improvements to the park and partial repairs to the dam on Lower Range Pond. The company, owned by the Connecticut-based Perrier Group of America, will also donate a conservation easement to protect the wooded view across the pond from the park's popular beach and will pay a half-penny for each gallon of water it extracts from the park. This fee - which could add up to about a $1 million a year depending on Poland Spring's use - will be applied to recreational improvements throughout the state park system.

While many local and state officials hail the agreement as a "win, win" for all involved, the deal has not escaped criticism.
Rep. Lois Snowe Mello, R-Poland, helped usher the deal through the legislative approval process last year, but now she is angry about it. She feels the state is acting too slowly on its promise to find the money to repair the dam on Lower Range Pond, which is in "imminent danger of collapse," according to Poland Town Manager Richard Chick.

The agreement with Poland Spring includes $30,000 for repairs to the dam - just half the amount needed to complete the project. The balance was to come from the dam's out-of-state owners. But under the state's dam abandonment law, the dam's owners are not required to repair it, and can even breach it if they so choose, according to Snowe Mello. Recently the dam's manager, John Bogert of CHI Energy in Andover, Mass., said the repair project was on his "back burner" and has been so for months.

Poland Spring has already dug two wells on park property under the new agreement. It may be just a few weeks from drawing water from them. Meanwhile, the dam repair project appears to be on hold.

"This is outrageous," said Snowe Mello, who based her support for the Poland Spring project mainly on the state's promise to get the dam repaired. "Things do run a little slowly, but I'm going to have to start making some phone calls."

If she sees no sign of movement in coming months, Snowe Mello said she will introduce legislation to find the money to fix the dam, taking it from the Bureau of Parks and Lands budget if she must.

State officials insist they will work out the details that remain.

"Clearly this is not something that we do every day," said Ralph Knoll, director of land acquisition for the Bureau of Parks and Lands and one of the chief negotiators in the Poland Spring agreement. Knoll acknowledged that the state recently dropped the ball on the dam project, saying it was caused by "unforeseen circumstances." The point man for the dam-repair project for the parks department got sick and passed away last fall, Knoll said. He hasn't been replaced. The dam project just landed in Knoll's lap. And, he assured, "it's not on our back burner."

The project started nearly three years ago when the fast-growing Poland Spring began to look for water beyond the borders of its 400 wooded acres next to Range ponds. The company has doubled in size in the last five years, and now produces revenues of $400 million a year, according to Perrier President Kim Jeffrey.

The company is permitted to extract 245 million gallons of spring water from four wells on its land next to the park. The park surrounds three bodies of water: Lower, Middle and Upper Range ponds. Poland Spring also draws another 75 million gallons from a site near Mechanic Falls that's not regulated by the state because of the small size of the facility there. Additionally, the company plans to build a bottling plant in Hollis, in southern Maine.

Still, as the largest bottled spring water company in the country, more water was needed, Jeffrey said.
"We had a suspicion that a lot of flow of our original spring actually overlapped our property and park property, which is right next door," Jeffrey said. Testing revealed significant amounts of water below the surface of the park.

The aquifer dates back to Maine's ice age, according to Craig Neil, a state geologist for the Maine Geological Survey. Twelve thousand years ago, when much of Maine was covered in glacial ice, a river flowed either through the ice or just below it in the Poland Springs area. That river left behind an esker - a huge deposit of sand and gravel that is also a high-yield source of water. It's the kind of deposit that can support the needs of Poland Spring with little to no effect on the surrounding area, Neil said.

Once the company learned how much water there was, Perrier's Jeffrey approached Gov. Angus King about the project idea to gauge the level of interest. "We knew that state parks could use the money," Jeffrey said. "And this would be revenue generating."

The state was interested. Knoll and others from the Bureau of Parks and Lands took over.

"We looked at it very closely," Knoll said. "We were very concerned about it just from a resource perspective."

State park officials spent many hours talking with state geologists and environmental officials to learn whether the aquifer and Range ponds could be adversely affected, Knoll said. He and others were assured that there "would be minimal impact on the resource," he said.

They took the terms of a preliminary agreement to the Legislature. It included the company's promise to pay for hundreds of thousands of dollars in park improvements and assurances from the state geologist that the aquifer below Range ponds was not likely to be affected by the water withdrawal. Since the Bureau of Parks and Lands had never before sold its "commodities," legislative approval was advised to allow for additional scrutiny.

Snowe Mello introduced the bill for the governor in the spring of 1998 and ushered it through to final approval. "Everybody thought it was the best thing since apple pie," she said.

"There really wasn't much debate about it," Knoll said. "It was pretty straightforward. We had done our homework."

Knoll has been asked whether the deal sets a bad precedent that could be followed with similar arrangements in other parks. "The answer is 'no'," Knoll said. "This was a unique situation that presented itself. In the end, we developed and created a scenario that benefits the people of Maine."

Under the specific terms of the agreement, which Knoll expects will be signed any day now, Poland Spring will pay for the following improvements to Range Ponds State Park:

. A set of interpretive panels will be displayed to help visitors understand water quality in Maine.
. Park facilities will be renovated to make them accessible to disabled visitors.
. Two playgrounds will be installed; one near the beach, the other in the group-use area.
. A group shelter/education center will be constructed.

Poland Spring will also donate 110 acre-conservation easement to the park, the value of which has not been assessed.

"In the end, we think it's a win-win for everybody," Knoll said. The water extraction will be monitored by the state's Department of Environmental Protection, Knoll said. (See sidebar) As for concern over the aquifer, "Poland Spring is not going to jeopardize the resource because that's what they're in the business of: bottling water," said Knoll.

Perrier's Jeffrey said it's not an arrangement that needs to rely on trust.

"We do on all of our spring sources very extensive hydrogeological surveys," Jeffrey said. "So we know how much water can be extracted from a spring without harming the flow and we have monitoring devices throughout the area."

That monitoring information will be reported to the DEP and is available to the public, Jeffrey said. Additionally, he said, " We have $150 million invested in that plant. We have to protect the resource. It's only logical."

Comment on this story or discuss it with other readers in the SOLARIUM.