PHIPPSBURG

With an eye on ending a longstanding problem of illegal dumping of trash in The Basin, Phippsburg’s police chief announced Friday he had summonsed a local man for a recent dumping of debris in the rural area.

Charged with littering, a civil charge, was James Furbish, 44, of Phippsburg.

Phippsburg Police Chief John Skroski said he began his investigation into who dumped the pickup truck load-sized pile of garbage and construction debris late Wednesday night off Blackberry Hill. The following day, he said he photographed the site, and put on latex gloves to begin picking through the trash looking for evidence of where it came from.

Envelopes and receipts pointed him to an address on Bumpy Hill Road in Bath.

When Skroski went to the residence, which he said was under construction, he saw construction debris matching items found in The Basin. He said he then talked to the homeowner, who said he had paid Furbish to haul the debris away.

Skroski said he had already received a report of suspicious behavior from someone in the same neighborhood as Furbish who reported seeing his truck in the driveway late Wednesday night full of trash. But by later that night or early the next morning, it was empty and all the dumps were closed.

The debris was dumped in the Basin, a wooded, secluded area where Skroski said a lot of people walk or ride allterrain vehicles. There have been other littering cases and this is one of the larger ones the town has been able to solve.

It was a stinky job, Skroski said, “ripping through bags with diapers in them,” and there were drywall, insulation and plastics, “an environmental hazard on top of blight.”

Furbish was directed to clean up the trash and will have to go to court in January to answer to the civil littering charge, Skroski said. He said Furbish is eligible as a Phippsburg resident and had a permit to use the town’s transfer station.

Mike Young, the town administrator for Phippsburg, said the illegal dumping in the Basin has decreased since the Nature Conservancy took over ownership of the Basin, a 1,910- acre preserve in town, but there is still trash dumped there.

The town is unique in that it doesn’t charge a user-fee such as through use of a pay-per-bag system, Young said, but there are restrictions. The transfer station is for use only for Phippsburg residents and accepts only trash generated by residents in Phippsburg. It will accept building debris if the resident generates it themselves but not if they’ve hired a contractor to do the work as a way to control costs and the amount of waste going into the small transfer station. So whether or not a vehicle enters with a permit sticker on it, Young said transfer station attendees ask questions about construction debris and does their best to determined where items come from, and he believes most all items deposited in the Basin are coming from outside the town and not from resident taxpayers.

  dmoore@timesrecord.com