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Pamela Prodan of Wilton is a lawyer who practiced environmental advocacy and property law.
This happened before. Central Maine Power and Hydro-Quebec already tried to run a power line corridor through western Maine. In the summer of 1987, families, friends and neighbors learned about several possible corridor alternatives through western Maine to connect Hydro-Quebec to southern New England.
Just like it has taken this time, it took years back then, to kill the Hydro-Quebec corridor. Hundreds of volunteers around western Maine held organizing meetings, circulated and signed petitions, participated in state and federal agency proceedings, and protested at the State House in Augusta. We traveled inside and outside Maine, even to Canada, to educate people. We exposed and disputed the misrepresentations of CMP and Hydro-Quebec.
CMP and Hydro-Quebec had endless resources while we were just volunteers who did not choose this work. We determined we had to stop that project to prevent the environmental destruction and the impact on cultural resources from the power line and corridor. We named our organization No Thank Q Hydro-Quebec.
After we won the battle at the Maine Public Utilities Commission, I went to law school. While a student at the University of Maine School of Law, I won a national energy law writing competition for my paper, “The Legal Framework for Hydro-Quebec Imports.”
I concluded in my paper that “The United States and Canadian legal systems are structured so as to promote wasteful and environmentally destructive energy development.” I also warned: “Legally, nothing precludes CMP from returning with a new Hydro-Quebec proposal for the power line.”
Here we are, 35 years later with the New England Clean Energy Connect transmission line project. Maine people voted last November to say we’re going to put a stop to this. By appealing the results of the direct ballot initiative, which is now before Maine’s highest court, NECEC Transmission and Avangrid Networks, both affiliated with CMP, have shown they don’t intend to give up.
For so many of us here in western Maine, the land has more wealth than anything you could compensate for. It is our culture and future well-being. No amount of compensation or mitigation is enough to justify the destruction that would be caused by this power line corridor.
Any “sweetening of the deal” is just money. It does not and will not ever compensate for the terrible thing that is proposed. Mitigation, such as making the developer buy conservation lands, does not stop the environmental destruction of the corridor.
Maine people saw they couldn’t rely on Maine elected officials and government agencies to carry out Maine’s public policies in such a way as to stop this environmentally destructive power line corridor. Maine people decided to take responsibility for those public policies themselves and voted for the initiative in order to put some guardrails on this latest notion of a CMP-Hydro-Quebec power line corridor.
Under Maine’s Constitution, there is no higher expression of public policy than the direct ballot initiative. In the last 50 years, many issues have gone to the voters, when people wanted to amend Maine law because they thought that state government was not being responsive. Without the direct ballot initiative, we might not have a number of laws intended to protect Maine’s environment and its people.
Past ballot initiatives have created the Bigelow Preserve, deauthorized the widening of the Maine Turnpike, required voter approval of low-level radioactive waste disposal, and upheld Maine’s returnable bottle law. Each of these votes targeted a specific development project or issue, and most, if not all, had retroactive effect intended to protect Maine’s environment and its people.
Will Maine’s highest court overturn the will of hundreds of thousands of Maine people who voted this past November to correct the public policy that they realized would not prevent this environmentally destructive energy development? The people of Maine have spoken.