DAILY BULLDOG • August 23, 2021
In 1993, Maine’s Constitution was amended to make sure governors couldn’t mess with public lands. Apparently, the two most recent holders of that office never got the memo. Both former Gov. Paul LePage, a Republican, and current Gov. Janet Mills, a Democrat, approved leasing about 33 acres of public land in the West Forks area to Central Maine Power for a transmission line, euphemistically called the New England Clean Energy Connect or NECEC, to carry Canadian electricity to Massachusetts. In early August, Superior Court Justice Michaela Murphy ruled that the state Bureau of Public Lands had made “very fundamental” mistakes in approving the LePage and Mills leases because it had “provided no public administrative process at all” in approving the deal. ~ Al Diamon