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A Good Project to Investigate

Regarding the Nov. 23 article “Town Bids for Energy-Saving Project in ZREC Auction,” I think putting solar panels on the former Turnpike Auto Wreckers property on Pond Meadow Road in Westbrook to generate electricity would be a good project to investigate for the use of that property.

The cleanup cost for contaminated property commercial project such as this would be a small percentage of the millions of dollars in cleanup costs needed for residential use. It has become apparent that there is not much interest in the complexities and costs for any residential development seeing that it has been over twenty years with very little progress. A solar farm project would be the least costly and the quickest project to complete and get the property back on the tax books and producing tax revenue as many people hope for. Also a project like this would require the least amount of state grants, which comes from our taxes, so the payback and break-even point would be much sooner.

For residential development, it would take millions of dollars in state grants for cleanup and millions more in state grants for housing development; it would take decades to collect enough property taxes to equal the amount of state grants (our taxes) used for that project.

Joel Maynard

Westbrook