If you don’t live in Wiscasset, Alna, or Westport Island, but you pay property taxes there, should you get to take trash to the Wiscasset transfer station? And should summer populations be figured into towns’ shares?

Those issues and some old and new ideas to address them came up June 12 when Alna selectmen and residents at the fire station talked trash ahead of the annual contract renewal. 

On one front, selectmen explained the station is no longer accepting trash from a Whitefield woman with a wood lot in Alna. No one lives there, he said.  The trash isn’t generated in Alna so it needs to go where Whitefield’s trash goes, to an Augusta facility, Second Selectman Doug Baston said.

Excluding trash from outside Wiscasset, Alna and Westport Island is nothing new, Superintendent Ron Lear said in a phone interview Friday. Other towns’ trash disposal is not allowed, and when it’s discovered, it is stopped, he said.

Former selectman Ed Pentaleri suggested Alna propose Wiscasset look at selling stickers to landowners without homes if they want to use the station. "It seems as though, if you pay property taxes in one of the three towns, you ought to have access." The fees would avoid the landowners’ trash having an impact on the towns that fund the station, he explained.

Baston questioned if the towns' shares are being figured right. They are based on population; he said Alna and Westport Island have around 700 residents and the two each pay about a 13-percent share. But he said Westport Island's website says the town has about 1,200 people in the summer. That’s another 500 using the station, Baston said.

On Saturday, Westport Island First Selectman George Richardson said the town's population is the 718 from the last Census, and that the next Census is in 2020.

Participants in the June 12 discussion briefly mulled a question that has popped up on and off for years in Alna: Should it stop taking its trash to Wiscasset? Woolwich uses a private hauler, Baston said.

And the transfer station in Nobleboro is cheaper, but it's in Nobleboro, he said. Whenever the issue has come up, residents have chosen the convenience of Wiscasset, he said.

Baston said Wiscasset Town Manager John O'Connell is willing to look at proposing a change in the formula, possibly adding towns' valuations to the mix.

Lear said he would consider an Alna proposal, for the 2020-21 contract. It’s late to be making any changes for the 2019-20 one, he said. Alna’s tentative tab is $81,667, up $505 from last year’s, Lear said.

Swimming hole closing soon for season

The Head Tide Dam project will have the swimming hole inaccessible from July 8 through the end of the season, Third Selectman Greg Shute said. The way down to the swimming hole will be better as a result of the project, Shute added.