MAINE PUBLIC • September 2, 2022
This week’s ruling from Maine’s highest court on the controversial CMP transmission line managed to simultaneously deliver a victory, of sorts, to the project’s developers while also giving opponents more time and opportunities to kill the corridor. CMP and its partners had already cleared most of the vegetation along the 145-mile corridor route and spent nearly $450 million by the time work halted in November. In its ruling, Maine’s Supreme Judicial Court cited those statistics as potential proof that the referendum violated the “constitutionally protected vested rights” of the developers by imposing new requirements on the project after it had been permitted by the state and after so much work had been done. But the high court didn’t make a final determination on that “vested rights” issue. Instead, it ordered the Business and Consumer Court to figure that out.