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Dover-Foxcroft stares down massive tax hike to maintain ailing dam
Residents in Dover-Foxcroft could see their property tax bills increase by hundreds of dollars each year if the town commits to maintaining its ailing dam on the Piscataquis River to federal standards, officials said at a meeting in early February.
The projections provide the clearest details yet of the consequences of a town-wide vote in June, when voters rejected plans to remove the Mayo Mill dam. Removing the dam would likely have been funded with outside grants; town officials say there are likely far fewer outside funding opportunities available for ongoing maintenance.
The dam has been out of compliance with federal regulations for years, and mounting pressure from regulators means that Dover-Foxcroft will likely have to commit to the costs of repairs by the end of the year, according to the town dam committee’s Feb. 4 presentation, or risk thousands of dollars in daily fines.
The committee is tasked with providing recommendations for the dam’s future to the town select board and was reconfigured with a slate of new members after the June referendum. Its chair, town select board member Stephen Grammont, provided a stark warning to attendees at the start of the committee’s February meeting.
“There is no way of avoiding this: the numbers you'll hear about are very large,” Grammont said. “I have to emphasize that if you find the numbers scary, it's because they're scary, not because we are deliberately trying to scare people.”
The dam hasn’t produced electricity or had any major repairs in over 18 years, and its deteriorating fish ladder doesn’t meet federal standards for endangered species like Atlantic salmon, which has historically spawned upstream in the Piscataquis River’s headwaters.
The committee voted in December to recommend not restoring its power-producing capabilities after a fresh engineering study estimated that its operation and maintenance costs would exceed any electricity revenue, narrowing the committee’s focus to repairs.
Without outside funding, maintaining the dam to federal standards would run the town just under $10 million, including $6.6 million to repair the structure itself and nearly $3 million to upgrade its passage for migrating fish. None of the identified projects would mitigate the heightened flooding that the dam causes upstream.
The total cost balloons to over $16 million when factoring for yearly interest accrual on a 25-year bond, and Grammont was quick to stress that’s likely an underestimate given rising construction and materials costs.
“They're not something you can count on being accurate,” Grammont said. “And as everybody knows, costs have been going up increasingly and suddenly.”
The town would rely on a sizable property tax increase if it self-finances the project, causing a Dover-Foxcroft resident with a $350,000 property valuation to pay an additional $679 per year over the next quarter century.
Although members of the dam committee are skeptical of the dam’s ability to attract government or private grant awards for its repairs, they have identified 10-15 grants that the fishway project and removal of the dam’s powerhouse could be eligible for. To have a shot at winning those awards, however, the town needs to first develop an engineering plan, which it hasn’t started.
Meanwhile, a Feb. 10 deadline for one of those grants has already passed, and the clock is ticking for the others.
“These grants range from a few thousand dollars to… millions of dollars,” said committee member Sandy Perkins. “Again, there's no guarantee that we get any of these grants. They're all competitive. We have to have a plan, and that plan has to be finished.”
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