Ogunquit News
Ogunquit Transfer Station opens for business
By Virginia L. Woodwell
In a celebration of more than a year of teamwork, the town of Ogunquit hosted a ribbon-cutting ceremony last week on its new transfer station, which is now open on Berwick Road. The project was completed on time and under budget.
Photos by Virginia Woodwell
OGUNQUIT - Under sunny skies at 11:30 a.m. on Friday, June 22, scores of local residents and their guests assembled at the town's new Berwick Road transfer station to celebrate the opening of the facility.
There, in a brief ribbon-cutting ceremony, officials representing varying facets of the project listed multiple reasons for celebration.
Not only was the station, which was built on newly-cleared property adjacent to the old transfer station, now obviously spanking-clean, spacious, and state-of-the-art, but it had been completed on time and under budget.
Moreover, they said, it had been built with an exceptional degree of cooperation among all involved.
Kevin O'Neil, co-chairman of the Ogunquit Transfer Station Committee, which had shepherded the project through all its stages almost from first inception, termed that work "truly rewarding," and Town Manager Phil Clark, after saying that the station "will serve the town well beyond the life of those of us here," credited its successful completion to that committee, calling them "a group of dedicated residents."
It had been suggested, Clark quipped, that the committee worked so well together that they might be retained to apply their skills to other town issues.
Randy Tome, an engineer for the firm Woodard-Curran, which designed the facility, termed the committee "a pleasure to work with," making his experience on the project "absolutely terrific," and he was echoed by Katrina Morgan, who supervised the construction phase for the H. E. Sargent Corporation of Stillwater, which built the facility.
"I've been in this business for 25 years, and this was one of the most enjoyable projects I've ever been involved in," Morgan said.
A surprise element in Friday's ceremony was the unveiling of a street sign labeling one of the facility's roads "Broomfield Lane." Honored in the unveiling was committee member Frank Broomfield, who also served as the project's clerk-of-the-works.
Additionally, resident Adam Fisher, acting on behalf of his father, state Rep. Charles D. Fisher of Brewer, presented Ogunquit officials with a United States flag that had flown over the Maine state capitol.
The ribbon-cutting ceremony was held close to the transfer-station's entrance, in front of a truck scales and weigh station, with avenues extending out behind them in two broad ribbons of tarmac designed to route traffic in one-way patterns out to and back from the station's other chief features some distance away.
These include 10 full-sized roll-on, roll-off containers - dumpsters - ranged around a U-shaped lower level, to be filled from a vehicle-accessible upper level. Signs along the upper level identify which recyclables - clear glass, colored glass, paper and cardboard, etc. - are to be dumped into which containers; in the same spot, two compactors for household trash, and a housing tower from which the operation can be run and overseen; adjacent, a building, 60 feet long and about 40 wide, to protect collected hazardous waste from the elements, and to provide a workshop, shelter for maintenance equipment, safety features such as an emergency shower, and a director's office with lunch room and lavatory.
In a separate interview, Transfer Station Committee member Rich Blouin, who was directing traffic that day, listed some of the chief ways in which the new facility will be an improvement over the old. Access from Berwick Road, he said, will be safer; traffic within is engineered to flow better; there are more recyclable containers than before, with all now owned by the town, and two compactors; communication among various buildings, including the new weigh-scales house, is built-in; there will be no more burning or bulldozing as wood will be chipped, or trucked off site for sale as an energy source, and wood chips, as well compost, will be available, free, to residents; the facility boasts multiple safety features, conforms to all federal standards for safety, and has been planned to accommodate more recyclables as they may become mandated and/or valuable, and the new station is buffered from the road and surrounding area as the previous one couldn't be.
Among the items the new transfer station is set up to handle are solid waste, paper and cardboard, clear glass, colored glass, aluminum, tin cans, plastic, shingles, sheet rock, construction and demolition debris, carpet, furniture, tires, metal, masonry products, waste oil and Freon.
The new station occupies four acres of a 30-acre site purchased by the town for this purpose when it became clear that it would not be able to extend the lease it had on the previous transfer station site beyond the year 2007.
In April, 2006, voters approved a $2.4 million bond issue to build the new facility, after Woodard-Curran had been engaged to draw up preliminary plans. Design plans were completed that summer and the project put out to bid in September, with Sargent Corporation's bid of $1,841,530 the lowest received. Construction began in October and was completed on schedule this month.
"It was one of the smoothest-run projects the town has ever undertaken," said Blouin.
Blouin reported that final cost figures had not yet been tallied so that it was not yet known how much under budget the project had run, but other sources suggested that the savings were likely to be in the neighborhood of $100,000.
Other members of the Transfer Station Committee, in addition to O'Neil, Broomfield, and Blouin, were Jacqueline Bevins, Stillman Bradish and Graham Simonds.
Simonds will be serving as the new facility's director.
