Wiscasset Town Manager Dennis Simmons said Feb. 4, he had ordered work to stop on cleanup of the North Point area near the former Mason Station power plant. Simmons said the Environmental Protection Agency informed the town its grant for the work had been frozen.

“I do expect it to be unfrozen. But I don’t want to take a chance of us accumulating liabilities that we haven’t budgeted and don’t want to pay for," Simmons told selectmen. 

The stop in work was "not really a huge deal, there wasn’t a whole lot going on out there right now anyways with the winter, but hopefully by spring this will be cleared up and we can get back to work on that. I don’t expect that it’s going to be a problem,” he reiterated. 

This was not the first time cleanup efforts in the Mason Station area have briefly faced a federal funding freeze. Early in President Trump's first administration in 2017, a temporary freeze included EPA grant funds the town had sought toward cleanup of several parcels near the plant. According to Wiscasset Newspaper files, the EPA had already received the Wiscasset request when the freeze occurred, and the freeze was lifted days later.

This new freeze involved a $700,000 EPA grant Wiscasset won in May 2023 for planning, engineering, and safe removal and disposal of inorganic contaminants and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon contaminates, according to Wiscasset Newspaper files; the grant came under the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law (BIL). 

Simmons emailed some of the project's participants after the EPA canceled their next meeting due to the BIL funding freeze. Simmons noted the work stoppage, explaining in that email, "I realize little has been going on, but I feel it is irresponsible to accumulate any liabilities on the town without having the answers on funding. While I expect the administration will honor existing contracts, until we know for sure we should sit tight."

Providing that email at Wiscasset Newspaper's request Feb. 5, Simmons also answered questions and gave an update. "I received a call from (the EPA) today advising we can continue. There has been little going on with the project to this point. Waiting for spring to kick into high gear."

Selectmen were without members Pamela Dunning and James Andretta Feb. 4. "We're down two tonight because of sickness," Chair Sarah Whitfield said in the meeting carried over Zoom and YouTube.

The town’s new website, at wiscasset.me.gov, is set to go live around March 1, Simmons said. “It looks good. I think it’s going to be a vast improvement … I’m looking forward to getting it up and running.” He said he and Economic Development Director Aaron Chrostowsky were about to go through days of training on it.

Wiscasset.org will also stay live for about six months after the new site goes live, Simmons said. And email addresses will change. “There will be a lot of press releases about this when the time comes,” Simmons said. 

He added, the .gov website would be more secure than the current site. “This (change) just adds another layer of protection against the cyber thieves that want to try to break into our systems.”

The board nodded the adult use cannibas storefront license for JAR, 564 Bath Road; accepted Patrick Sandefur's resignation from the Climate Action Team and put Jennifer Surgenor on it; and heard resident Ed Polewarczyk state in public comment, with Wiscasset students having tested lower than state averages and early budget numbers showing a potential 6% hike in costs for 2025-26, "the only acceptable future for the schools of Wiscasset ... is to become the top rated schools in the state ... I do not want to see our schools die." Polewarczyk made some of the same points to the school committee last month. 

Also in his comments to selectmen, Polewarczyk praised Wiscasset schools' transportation and maintenance director, John Merry, for his decades of doing "an outstanding job."