In what some are calling a move to get leverage over the Midcoast Regional Redevelopment Authority, the Brunswick Town Council tabled the authority’s over $1.5 million funding request Monday night.

The authority, which oversees redevelopment of the former Brunswick Naval Air Station and is on the hook for the disastrous Aug. 19 spill of toxic firefighting foam, came under fire as residents questioned its funding request and the town’s representative on the Restoration Advisory Board cast doubts on the accuracy of its toxic foam inventory.

The funding, which was a tax increment financing request — or a TIF — to support critical infrastructure and MRRA’s Capital Improvement Budget at the Landing, was tabled by a unanimous vote Monday.

Chairperson Abby King said she moved to do so in order to address many questions and concerns raised by the public. She said that the Town Finance Committee will review the TIF request on Thursday.

An audience member asked if MRRA would attend the meeting, to which Town Manager Julia Henze responded that the authority was invited and noted that MRRA Deputy Director Jeffrey Jordan, who was in the audience, was nodding his head.

Brunswick Rep. Dan Ankeles commended the council for tabling the request, noting that it was important to do while council pressured MRRA for more action.

“I think it really is important to use every bit of leverage possible to keep ourselves in the fight with respect to Hangar 6 and just continue to push for the fastest possible swap out of AFFF there,” he said, referring to aqueous film-forming foam (AFFF), the type of toxin-containing foam that spilled in Hangar 4 on Aug. 19.

Some residents, including Shaun Hogan, said that the funding should instead be used for updating fire suppression systems and mitigation efforts.

“We asked MRRA to shut down their fire suppression [system] out of precaution to safeguard our town’s water supply, and they straight up refused to do it,” Hogan said. “Now they’re asking us for money, and I say we should straight up refuse to do it, or we should take a carrot-and-stick approach.”

The council requested the Hangar 6 fire suppression system be shut down by Sept. 30 over some concerns of leaks and spill risk. The MRRA board held two emergency meetings — the last of which was on Oct. 1 — to come to a decision on the town’s requests, including the shutdown, and ultimately decided to keep the system on. The entity has maintained that it cannot shut down the systems and that doing so would financially impact its aviation tenants.

MRRA requested the TIF funding in July, according to a letter from former Executive Director Kristine Logan to Henze.

On Sept. 11, Logan, who resigned this month, and Jordan presented the request to Brunswick’s MRRA TIF Committee, which is comprised of Councilors Jennifer Hicks, David Watson and King. The request, which the committee unanimously recommended for approval by the council, would have pulled from a majority of the total project funds in the Base Redevelopment Project Account for the current tax year.

Jordan said that the funding is sourced through property taxes that come from MRRA tenants on the airport or the Landing, or through properties MRRA sells. The resolution draft stated that the payments to MRRA would be made in two installments after the October and April tax payment dates.

Concerns of inaccuracies

Shortly after the TIF was tabled, the town’s representative on the Restoration Advisory Board, David Page, claimed that MRRA did not deliver an accurate inventory of AFFF in the hangars at the airport.

Page said that MRRA’s inventory submission — which was requested by the town in its early September PFAS resolution that demanded action from MRRA, the Department of Environmental Protection and others in the wake of the spill — was “misleading” and had “grave errors.”

In a memo to the town, Page said that the type of AFFF reported in Hangar 4 and the type and amount of AFFF reported in Hangar 6 were incorrect. He provided a DEP 2019-2020 inventory in his report, which stated that Hangar 4 had two types of AFFF: an Ansulite formulated foam and a foam known as 3M Lightwater. Both foams contain PFAS (or “forever chemicals”), which are known to be harmful to human health, but Page said that 3M Lightwater contains PFOS, a particularly harmful type of PFAS.

The DEP report also noted that Hangar 6 had 800 gallons of 3M Lightwater, which did not match the MRRA report submitted to the town in neither type nor amount.

“Frankly, I don’t know where they got those numbers,” Page said. “It was pulled out of somewhere, I don’t know where.”

The concern, Page said, was that the MRRA report suggests that hangars like number 6 pose less of a health and safety risk.

The MRRA-submitted inventory to the town was dated Oct. 4 and reported that there was zero AFFF left in Hangar 4 but that it had contained only the Ansulite foam. In the same report, it said that Hangar 6 had 1,500 gallons of the Ansulite foam.

Page’s concerns sparked questions among the council, prompting Councilor Sande Updegraph to ask Page who at MRRA is preparing the documentation that was sent to the town and whether the possible inaccuracies were intentional or a result of incompetency. King said that MRRA would need to directly respond to Updegraph’s questions. Jordan was not visibly present in the audience during the discussion.