Once news gets out that Wiscasset selectmen are talking about bottle collection practices at the Wiscasset transfer station, more local causes will want their own boxes there, Wiscasset Selectmen’s Chairman Pam Dunning said.

“I guarantee it, because there’s a lot of money in cans and bottles,” Dunning said.

Interim Town Manager Don Gerrish found no policy on bottle collections at the station, but he said over the years, organizations including the Lions Club and the American Legion have collected bottles there.

If others want to, the town will need a policy on the number of boxes that can be at the station and how long any one group can have a box there, Dunning said at the board’s August 5 meeting.

“To try to put a policy together is going to be very difficult,” Gerrish said.

Dunning agreed. “It’s going to get messy.”

Selectman Bill Barnes’ recent questions about the collections at the station led to Tuesday night’s discussion. Barnes suggested all the bottles that come to the station could go to the town, and that the board could consider tapping that money when it receives requests.

William Cossette Jr., commander of American Legion Post 54 in Wiscasset, said that group and others that have received station users’ donated bottles, have benefited from the collections. The Legion takes in little money from dues, Cossette said.

The board decided 5-0 to get back to the issue on September 2. In the meantime, the station will accept no new collection boxes, Gerrish said.

Is this an emergency?

As soon as the state puts up new signs on Route 1 from Huber’s Market to the Woolwich line, the side of the road will be for parking only due to an emergency.

It always was, until the previous signs wore out and the rule was no longer enforceable, Wiscasset Police Chief Troy Cline and Town Planner Misty Parker told selectmen. In the last year, complaints have come in about visibility problems posed by parked tractor-trailer trucks, the officials said.

The state will provide the signs; it’s up to the town to maintain them, Parker said. “Otherwise, we’ll be in the same position as before,” she said.

Barnes, who favored a narrower stretch for the signage, cast the lone dissenting vote in selectmen’s 4-1 approval of the signage.

Gardiner Pond update

Now that Wiscasset has lined up $275,325 in Land For Maine’s Future funds to help buy land on Gardiner Pond, the next step is getting an appraisal, Parks and Recreation Director Todd Souza said.

The appraisal is the most critical part of the process, Gerrish said. The outcome will help the town determine whether to pursue the land buy, and could impact the size of the grant the town was pegged to receive, according to Gerrish and Souza.

Land for Maine’s Future will not fund more than half the purchase, so depending on what the appraisal comes in at, the funding could be pared, Souza said. The town has two years to use the money, he said.

Selectmen agreed to spend up to $2,500 on the appraisal, expected to cost $4,000 to $5,000. The town would likely pay the full amount and then seek reimbursement for half of it from Kennebec Estuary Land Trust, the town’s partner in the project.

Barnes asked Souza if taking the grant money would permanently commit the town to anything. Souza said he would find out. Past grant money the town got for a playground required that another one go up in town if that location’s use ever changed, Souza said.