By nearly a 3-1 margin, Pembroke residents, during a special town meeting the evening of May 4, passed a local ordinance to prohibit metallic mining in the town. With 129 in support, 48 opposed and two votes that were indecipherable, the moderator, Dennis Mahar, pronounced, "Clearly the ordinance passes."
      At 6 p.m. the town office was already full, with a long line of more voters snaking out along the road. It took until 6:30 for everyone to register and collect their ballots. At one point, Town Clerk and Registrar of Voters Janice Scanlon had to make more ballots, with a lull in the line's movement met with patience despite a drizzly evening.
      With a room packed far beyond capacity, Mahar opened the meeting to a few comments before a motion was made and quickly seconded to close the comment period. Voters were asked to deposit their ballot in a box located by Scanlon at the head of the room. Because of the number of people, the line formation to vote was a chaotic business at the start, but soon voters self sorted and moved smoothly forward to cast their ballots in the box and exit the building. Some then returned to wait for the count, while others stood outside talking. Voting was completed in an orderly 10 minutes. Scanlon went outside to make sure that there was no one left who needed to vote. In short order the ballots were counted and the vote announced, with the whole proceeding having taken less than an hour. A law enforcement officer was present for the duration.
      The ordinance means that industrial scale metal mining operations cannot take place in Pembroke and endanger the town's natural resources, explains the Friends of Cobscook Bay, the group behind the writing of the ordinance.
      The Friends note that Wolfden Resources recently announced the purchase of mineral rights to 800 acres in the Big Hill area. The company completed exploratory drilling in this area over the winter and reported its findings to potential investors in a March 2022 report.
      Wolfden's earlier 2021 petition to the Land Use Planning Commission (LUPC) for rezoning of its Pickett Mountain mine landholdings was withdrawn in October 2021 due in part to the LUPC staff report on numerous errors, omissions and inconsistencies in its petition. LUPC expects that the company will resubmit a Pickett Mountain proposal application.
      Wolfden CEO Ron Little did not respond to a request for comment about the approval of the Pembroke ordinance at the special town meeting.
      At an April 6 Pembroke public meeting regarding the proposed mining ordinance, Aga Dixon, an attorney with Drummond Woodsum who specializes in municipal law and who drafted the proposed ordinance, explained that when the Maine Legislature created the Maine Department of Environmental Protection's (DEP) Chapter 200 water quality regulation, it was "aimed at massive scale mining, nothing else." She added that the legislature left everything else up to towns and local control. She elaborated with examples such as how a town might govern the impacts and costs of a mining company's heavy transport trucks on local roads, or the blasting impacts on building foundations. A local ordinance "deals with the issues that the state has expressly carved out for local control to create for itself," she said.
      The Friends of Cobscook Bay is a nonprofit organization based in Pembroke whose mission is helping to protect the health of Cobscook Bay and its watersheds. Cobscook Bay is a state Ecological Focus Area in the Downeast region.