MADAWASKA, Maine — Madawaska and its biggest employer, Twin Rivers Paper Co., are clashing after town officials denied a request to lower the assessed value of the mill’s real estate by $25.3 million to reduce its overall tax bill.

The Select Board made the decision last week, during a heated hour-and-a-half discussion with company officials. The mill is seeking the abatement after the town corrected what it says was an earlier assessing mistake — a correction that pushed up the factory’s valuation by more than $20 million.

Now, the mill is planning to escalate its abatement request and file an appeal of the town’s decision with the state.

According to records provided to the Select Board at its April 29 meeting, both sides disagree about how the town calculated the mill’s tax bill.

Twin Rivers has accused the town of erroneously swapping its real estate and personal property assessments.

But the town has contested this, arguing that it made a different error that resulted from the assessor mistakenly using the mill’s reimbursed value instead of its assessed value from 2021 to 2023.

The mill’s personal property values in 2020, 2021, 2022 and 2023 were, respectively, $65 million, $43.7 million, $43.7 million and $41.4 million. If the error had not occurred, the town says these values would have been $65 million, $68.2 million, $68.6 million and $65.1 million.

After catching this error, the town set the mill’s 2024 valuation to what officials say it should have been in 2023, which is $65.2 million — a $23.7 million increase over the previous year’s value of $41.4 million.

“My opinion is there was no mistake made this year,” Town Assessor Lewis Cousins said at the April 29 meeting. “It was in the past few years, to the mill’s advantage.”

Twin Rivers Paper Company CEO Tyler Rajeski, pictured on the left side of the screen, remotely joined a Madawaska Select Board meeting in which officials denied a $25 million abatement from the mill. Pictured below, from left to right, are Madawaska Tax Assessor Lewis Cousins and Madawaska Town Manager David Daigle. Credit: Chris Bouchard / The County

He concluded that the mill has not proven that the numbers are wrong, and that their suggestion that the numbers were swapped is not true.

The town also hired a third-party assessor, Brandon Saucier of Saucier Services, to look at the situation, and he also concluded that the town’s $65.2 million assessment was correct.

Twin Rivers CEO Tyler Rajeski cited a 2018 letter from the town that indicated the total combined value of the mill was roughly $101.75 million, and that up until 2024 the town had only made minor changes to this value.

“In 2024, all of a sudden, the total value increased over 20 percent to $127 million because Lewis claims he made a mistake,” Rajeski said.

He said that, during a time when tariffs are threatening to increase Twin Rivers’ costs by millions per year, the town is suggesting increasing taxes on the business instead of rallying to help it.

Rajeski cited the recent closure announcement of the Chillicothe paper mill in Ohio, which will affect more than 800 employees, and how that state’s government worked to ensure that the mill would stay open until the end of the year.

The CEO argued that the mill’s value should continue to go down, considering the market, its aging equipment and the amount of investment required to grow the mill’s value.

“To think that the value is going up every year when it’s depreciating is not reasonable,” he said. “There’s a reason that when our competitors shut down, no one pays even a dollar for them. I was offered to buy Chillicothe for a dollar, and I said no.”

Cousins said that while these issues affect everyone, the matter at hand is the valuation.

“What’s going on with tariffs and what’s going on with the industry, that’s not the town’s issue,” he said. “It’s Twins’ issue, there’s no question. But the value has got to be placed on what’s there and what is produced.”

Select Board member Renee Deschaine made a motion to deny the request and to allow Twin Rivers to move forward with the process of taking its request to the state level. The motion was not seconded. A motion to approve the request was made. That also failed, and the discussion continued.

“If you guys want to deny it, go ahead and deny it,” Rajeski said. “You’re going to regret continuing to try to hurt the mill. The towns need the mills to survive. The mills need the towns to survive. A world where you put more financial pressure on the mill, all you’re doing is accelerating the decline of the mill.”

Select Board Chair Jason Boucher, before the discussion, clarified that he works for Twin Rivers Paper, and board members voted to allow him to remain part of the discussion.

Boucher said the town does care about the mill, and would not have gone through the process of hiring a third party assessor and allocating extra resources to this issue if it didn’t. He said that all the board can work with are the facts and the numbers in front of them.

Select Board member Jenney Dionne, acknowledging the growing hostility of the discussion, asked Rajeski whether there was any way the town could continue to work with the mill to try and help. Officials told Dio

Town Manager David Daigle spoke in favor of denying the request, saying the decision should not be based on emotions, and that approving the request could open the town up to bargaining abatements with every other business.

Darcy Ouellette, finance manager at Twin Rivers Paper Co., speaks to the Madawaska Select Board on April 29 about a $25 million abatement request made after the mill’s evaluation jumped by more than $20 million due to an assessing error made in previous years. Credit: Chris Bouchard / The County

Rajeski responded that this is inaccurate because Twin Rivers had in the past bargained the assessed value and won. Boucher said the past case is not relevant to this one, and clarified that Daigle’s point was that this would open up the door for other businesses to come in and request an abatement.

Board member Renee Deshaine said she would be voting to deny the request based on the impact to taxpayers and on the weeks she spent reviewing the facts of the case.

“I can’t approve this abatement based on the facts that I have in front of me, and I can not look at the past that Tyler is referring to, because that’s not what’s in front of us today,” she said.

In response to Deschaine’s statement about taxpayer burden, Twin Rivers’ finance manager, Darcy Ouellette, asked if the board knew how much it would cost the town to go through the abatement process if the mill moves forward by taking its claim to the state.

Boucher said those costs are not related to the town’s decision. He said the town will decide whether or not to approve the abatement, and that it is up to Twin Rivers to decide if it wants to take the matter to court and cost the taxpayers extra money.

“It is inappropriate to hold it against us that if we make a ‘no’ decision on accepting the abatement, that it’s going to cost us a million dollars to go through court, and that ‘you should say yes so it doesn’t cost you money,’” he said. “That is not how we base our decision.”

Board members Boucher, Deschaine and Manon Bilodeau-Raymond all voted to deny the request. Dionne said she felt unsure about how to vote and ultimately abstained.

Correction: A previous version of this report misstated Jason Boucher’s position on the abatement. It also misspelled Tyler Rajeski’s last name in one place.