Well, years later, only one company moved into the industrial park ... one that was planning to relocate there anyway, and there are no new prospects on the horizon.  The president had once promised five to ten new businesses every year.  They built it, and nobody came.  That’s a field of dreams for you.

In an interview this summer with Scott Houldin of Point East, he remarked that Maine is a terrible place to do business, didn’t we understand that?

We did.  After all, we do business here every day.  But didn’t Houldin know that before he came to Maine?  The information was certainly freely available.  Mainers certainly knew it.  And yet, other industrial parks, such as the successful park in Brunswick, seem to be doing okay.

Another Point East project was of course Mason Station, which was to be turned into the Maritime Village, along with cottages and condos and businesses and a marina.  While some work has been done, including the building of a couple of roads, a couple of model homes, and a bit of “deindustrialization” of the power plant, the marina operators backed out, no homes have yet been sold at the site, and with the spectre of a coal-fired chemical plant a couple of miles away, it is unlikely that any ever will be sold.  Would you buy a million-dollar cottage a mile and a half away from a coal-fired chemical plant?

Neither would we.  And we doubt we’re alone.  Especially when other developers in the area are building similarly priced cottages on waterfront locations not too far away, in Edgecomb and Boothbay Harbor and Phippsburg.  And managing to sell them, too.

But instead of cutting its losses with this redeveloper, and rethinking the whole mess, Wiscasset heard them out about yet another pie-in-the-sky idea ... a coal gasification plant with the potential to sequester carbon dioxide and pump it safely underground somewhere, on land once owned by Maine Yankee. 

Coal gasification was yet another means of avoiding the reality of global warming by the Bush administration, while appearing to do ‘something’ about our dependence on foreign oil.  But even though the technology was years away, dollars freely flowed from the Department of Energy ... dollars that could have gone toward establishing American businesses to build wind or wave turbines, building better solar panels, working on better run of the river hydro plants, and other happier energy sources.  Electric car companies could have been started.  Or even, dare we say it, we could be working on better nuclear power ideas, such as breeder reactors rather than light water reactors, which produce far less waste.

And now, when the chickens have come home to roost, the touted carbon capture and sequestration programs that were about to be up and running financed with federal dollars ... well, aren’t.  Tampa Bay has admitted it can’t do it.  The proposed Minnesota plant has been deep-sixed for similar reasons. 

And those plants were put together by engineers who understood what they were dealing with, not redevelopers and salespeople. 

The failure of the Tampa Bay and Minnesota models tell us exactly what many of us have already been saying.  The technology for carbon capture and sequestration, even if we had a place to put the carbon, is not yet there.  It won’t be there for years to come.  In the meantime, if the proposed gasification plant is to be built, among all the other serious problems ... water and fishery degradation, odor, noise, traffic, black powder instead of white powder that is far  more toxic than the rock dust at Dragon Cement ever would have been, the loss of fishery jobs and all the jobs that depend on them ... there is no way, now or in the foreseeable future, to deal with the carbon dioxide emissions  that will stream from the plant ... twice the carbon dioxide output Maine puts out today.

We strongly urge the voters of Wiscasset to vote NO on the height ordinance variance on November 6.  This will be your very last chance to have any input at all about what this plant will look like, smell like, sound like.  This will be your last chance to require real answers, not nebulous promises backed up by nothing.  Don’t settle for a field of dreams ... wake up.