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RECEIVED DEC 0 8 2010 Melanie Curtis CITY OF ORONO City of Orono Dear Ms Curtis; We have received you letter dated December 1, 2010 and are providing you with this response to that letter. There are a few things in your letter that need correction/clarification. It is not correct that the dirt fill on our property was planned only for the proposed driveway. Much of the fill was needed to complete filling the hole from the house removal—we had experienced a lot of settling of the original fill, and we are certain there will be more settling in the spring. In addition,the plan was to use a majority of the remainder of the fill to level out the existing grade in our yard which was very rough due to it being a farm field for many years. Then once that project was completed, we would use whatever fill was remaining for the driveway project. When we began to distribute the dirt for the leveling, we found the dirt to be un-usable for that purpose because of the extremely high clay content—making it impossible to work with for this purpose. Had this plan worked, the majority of the dirt would have been used in September/October. The plan was then changed to use this dirt for the leveling of the old building site, the filling of the old septic site, and the driveway project, for which it would be well suited. We had hired a contractor to handle the septic removal, which was to be completed in October. It is currently partially completed, waiting for the contractor to return to complete filling the hole and leveling. The contractor had originally told us this would be completed in 2 weeks. We have now waited nearly 10 weeks, and have been told(after multiple phone calls)that it will be"a while"before they can get back to complete it. At that time we will have the rest of the dirt on the old house site cut down to the amount that will be needed with the spring settling. We are currently working with the watershed district to come to an agreement on the proposed driveway and how it would impact a"wetland". We believe the classification of the impacted area as a wetland to be questionable, and that it is described as so in the delineation report that was most recently completed. The watershed district is reviewing that information and we are in contact with them. It is possible we will take the steps necessary to change this classification, but we have not yet arrived at that point. With regard to the dirt fill, in hind site we would not have taken on the amount of fill we did had we known it would not be suitable for leveling the yard. When the fill became available,we saw it as an opportunity to help our neighbor and ourselves—they needed to get rid of the dirt and we needed some. We originally planned to spread the dirt in a timely fashion,but the dirt was wet when we received it and as you may recall we had several large rainfalls that prevented us from spreading it until it finally dried. We are continuing to work to have this resolved. Due to the factors listed, we believe it makes