By Dawn De Busk

Staff Writer

NAPLES — Naples Town Manager John Hawley is debunking the rumor that a major utility company installed new electric lines to power a future pot research facility.

“We, staff and selectmen, have been hearing on more than one occasion that the recent CMP powerline upgrades on Route 302 were being installed for the benefit of the future marijuana growing facility that was mentioned in a Portland Press Herald article last June,” Hawley said. 

“For the record, there have been no plans submitted to the town office for such a facility,” he said.  

“We have not heard a peep from those folks,” he said.

Hawley mentioned this matter during the meeting of the Naples Board of Selectmen on Monday, and also in an e-mail last week.

“For the past several months, Central Maine Power (CMP) has been doing extensive power line upgrades on Route 302 coming in from Bridgton to the Lambs Mill Road. During this work, rumors began to circulate that the power upgrades were for the exclusive benefit of the future one million square foot marijuana research facility that is going to be built in Naples,” he wrote.

However, the permits for the facility never materialized, he said.

“There have not been any inquiries or applications for the development of any such facility,” Hawley said.

A few residents doing business at the Naples town hall mentioned to the clerks that they had heard the rumor from a CMP lineman on the project, Hawley said.

“I reached out to Tim Laney of Central Maine Power for an official statement regarding the work and he offered the following: ‘John, it sounds like you are a victim of a rumor that grew legs and I cannot imagine that our crews or the contractors working on this project would intentionally start a rumor like this. I will follow up with the supervisors in that area and also the contractors that worked on this project as you requested.’ ”

According to CMP’s Laney, “This project has been in the works for years and as you know a project this size takes extensive planning, permitting, engineering, etc. This project was brought up in 2012 when we realized the Naples area was continuing to grow and we had to establish another reliable means of service for the customers in that area for the future.”

In fact, CMP purchased a sliver of land from the Town of Naples to put in a 7500kva transformer that was part of the system supplier electricity to customer.

“It has been my experience that people believe what they want to believe and you are never going to change that,” Laney said in his letter to Hawley, “But the truth is we built this for safe reliable service and nothing more than that.”