Compromise is hard, especially when it's your side has that has to do most of the compromising. Many of you have asked me how I will vote on the waste disposal question being put before voters in November. It's not the question I wish we were voting on, but I do believe we can accomplish more by voting yes than by protesting with a no vote.

Quite simply, we were outmaneuvered, and some Mid-Coast Solid Waste officials (and others) succeeded in running out the clock on our chance to continue working with the Municipal Review Committee, the nonprofit consortium of 187 towns to which we currently belong.

When voters at town meetings in Camden, Rockport, and Hope soundly rejected the idea of signing a 20-year contract for incinerating our waste, we asked for the opportunity to vote on staying with the MRC and partnering with Fiberight, a company using European technology to mechanically separate and anaerobically digest the things we put in dumpsters and yellow bags. Instead, the Midcoast Solid Waste Board, in a divided decision, voted to propose a 3-5 year contract with the same Portland-based waste to energy incinerator they proposed the first time.

The logic goes that this will allow us to wait and see if Fiberight works as it should, and then we will join a few years down the road. In the meantime, ecomaine is offering us the lowest price out there for this shorter contract, with a tipping fee that even beats the cost of landfilling. What we'll see are short term cost savings, but a contract that can put us in a potentially precarious situation 3-5 years down the road, given the fact that disposal capacity in Maine is forecasted to be outstrippped by demand after the inevitable closing of PERC's incinerator in Orrington.

There is no guarantee that Fiberight will have enough space for us, and if all towns adopted the "wait and see" philosophy like we have, nothing would ever get built.

Even ecomaine, as we stand now, is taking in more waste annually than they can process. According to their budget and annual reports, this has allowed them to scale back on "spot tonnage" from the Portland area so they can reclaim material "temporarily stored at their landfill;" a fact that underscores the MRC's contention that Maine needs another eco-friendly waste processing facility. ecomaine doesn't have space for additional waste without forcing Portland area trash to find another home, and this has been one of my principal objections to signing on with them.

If the 6,000 tons of waste we send to ecomaine means that 6,000 more tons of waste will be stored at their landfill as an insurance policy, is it still an eco-friendly option for us? Does it matter if 6,000 tons of commercial waste from Portland get turned away and landfilled somewhere else so they can make room for our trash?

With the new contracts ecomaine is signing, it's unclear to me where all the trash will go.

The good news is that even without us, the MRC and Fiberight have enough towns committed for the project to happen. It also appears likely that they will plan the facility to account for the fact that certain fence sitters like us will want in on it later. Towns who signed on early will enjoy the rebates, the lower tipping fee, and the satisfaction of having invested in an eco-friendly option that recovers more recyclables and carries a lower operational carbon footprint. Towns like ours who come knocking later on will have to pay what's fair, if there's still room. At this point, we're well over the deadline that the MRC extended for us twice, and asking for another would be unfair to the towns that did sign up on time feeling that the project's potential gains outweighed the risks.

There are still plenty of reasons to feel hopeful and motivated, and giving in on this issue, after having exhausted our options, will free up energy to focus on areas where we agree. Throughout this process, I've spent many hours talking with ecomaine's Lissa Bittermann. Perhaps ironically, we often chose to sit next to each other at town meetings talking about waste reduction even as we advocated for seemingly opposing paths.

If the rest of the employees of ecomaine are anything like Lissa, and I believe they are, I know they share in our ultimate goal of reducing waste, and I believe they can help us develop plans and proposals that town officials are more likely to support.

I personally am ready to help us take full advantage of the education programs that ecomaine offers, and I'm encouraged that they seem flexible enough that they're willing to help with recycling education even if we continue bailing our own recyclables.

During the multi-town debates, we made gains that we can expand upon. For the first time in many years, we got people in our four towns talking about trash, showing up at meetings, and asking tough questions of our elected officials and those running for office. For the first time, meetings of the waste board are being live streamed and recorded, and the entire board has agreed to support increased recycling initiatives and participation from a citizens committee. The conversation has helped identify many community members who are conservation minded and committed to waste reduction and Leonard Lookner joined us for a tour of the facility just the other day to brainstorm about how volunteers can help. For these reasons and others, I believe we can accomplish more by voting yes on this proposal than by dragging out the process with a protest vote. Those of us who still wish to protest the process should step up to the plate, run for our local offices, and encourage others to do the same.