If flooding inundates Wiscasset's sewer plant, that would be "a disaster site ... and we'd be jacking taxes to the moon, and begging everybody for money," Wastewater Superintendent Robert Lalli told voters Dec. 3 in a special town meeting. "We have to take action before something happens over there."

Some voters inside Wiscasset Community Center's Senior Center had financial questions and then most people raised their pink voter slips in favor of tapping the town's undesignated fund balance for the $353,750 local match on $4 million in outside funding won toward moving the plant to public works; as planned so far, public works would move to the transfer station.

To voters' questions, town officials said besides the $4 million from the Maine Infrastructure Adaptation Fund, the would-be project has garnered $5 million in earmarked, Congressionally directed spending; it is not yet known how much more in local taxes will have to go toward the estimated $50 million project that includes both departments' moves; and how much might be borne by sewer ratepayers rather than all taxpayers. Everything depends on how much more aid the town wins and how the town decides to cover grant matches and the project's remaining costs after all the outside funding, officials said.

Another town vote will be held "any time we have to appropriate money," Town Manager Dennis Simmons said.

"(These are) decisions that will have to be made as we go along, to know how much money we're actually going to have to put into this."

Outgoing Maine House District 47 Rep. Edward Polewarczyk said given a projected, nearly billion-dollar state deficit in the 2026-27 biennium, "I'm not comfortable that those grants are going to be here."

"We've got the (state) contract right here. All we've got to do is sign it and the money is ours," Simmons said about the $4 million grant. He told Polewarczyk, "I'm concerned about future funding for this project ... but I'm not concerned about these two pots of funding." Simmons said the federal funds will come through the Environmental Protection Agency, "and they're about two years behind in getting their other Congressionally directed spending stuff done."

State and federal environmental agencies will not give out grants to keep the sewer plant where it is, because it is in a floodplain, Selectmen's Chair Sarah Whitfield said.

"There really isn't a Plan B. The plant has to move," Lalli added. 

In a board meeting after the town meeting, selectmen nodded the state contract. 

The board nodded a business license for Charm Thai, 762 Bath Road, conditioned on the restaurant's turning in a survey the planning board called for. And selectmen nodded a liquor license renewal for Barnhouse Grill & Pub, 690 Bath Road.