Large mills shutting down are nothing new in Maine. But this was the mill that a couple of years ago Baldacci saved from a shutdown by arranging for the state to buy, for $26 million, G-P’s big waste dump, eliminating the corporation’s environmental liability. Then it leased to Casella Waste Systems for 30 years the right to use and expand the dump — in, critics say, a rigged, backroom deal for a fire-sale price ($26 million, the price the state paid G-P for the dump). Under this agreement, G-P used the $26 million to buy a second-hand wood-burning boiler to power the mill, thereby becoming more efficient and theoretically enabling the mill to stay open. (See “Dumping Ground,” by Alex Irvine, April 8, 2004.)
Environmentalists and good-government watchdogs fought this complex deal. In the end, says Paul Schroeder, an activist in the Bangor-area citizens’ group We the People: “Not only do we have no jobs, not only do we have a stinking landfill which we know will be toxic, not only do we have a polluting boiler because it can burn demolition debris, but we also have a setup with millions of tons of demolition-debris waste coming into the state for the foreseeable future.” Such debris, he says, contains arsenic-treated wood, and polyvinyl chloride, which produces dioxins when burned.
Another We the People activist, Debbie Gibbs, when asked about Baldacci’s reputation in Old Town, seethes: “I don’t think he’s got a reputation. He’s not my governor.” She is running as an independent for the state senate. In her group, it’s probably hard now to look at Democrats as the environmentalist party. Baldacci’s policies have not discouraged the growth of the Greens.
Old Town was Baldacci’s signature mill rescue. Many people in the Second Congressional District, which he once represented in Congress and where he already is the most unpopular, will draw a lesson from this second closure.
What lesson? In the Phoenix story on the G-P-Casella-Baldacci deal, then-state senator Tom Sawyer, a Republican, said: “We should never bemoan when a lion eats a baby in the jungle because that’s what lions do. If corporate America took advantage of the state, who’s to blame — the corporation or the state for allowing itself to be victimized?” Baldacci’s unpopularity could partly mean that voters may be willing to try another approach to governing than unmitigated friendliness to the corporate lions.
Baldacci may be the corporations’ perfect fall guy — as much their victim as their instrument. For a while, he provided cover for them (give them anything they ask and everything will be better), but in the end they are moving out of the state, not in; we are in the new global economy. The interests of global corporations and Maine citizens are not the same.
Baldacci, though, just can’t stop promising. The Kennebec Journal editorialized that Baldacci was making “a big political wager” on his promise to find a buyer for the G-P mill within 60 days, to reopen it: “Failure would certainly be used by his opponents to portray Baldacci as a governor who promises more than he can deliver.”
