Now is not the time to be buying up oil for the nation's reserves, U.S. Senator Susan Collins said in a visit to the newspaper on Friday.

"High heating oil and gas prices have resulted in a tremendous hardship on the country, particularly low and middle income families, truck drivers, and school districts," she said. Collins and U.S. Rep. Karl Levin of Michigan sponsored the Energy Policy Act of 2005, in which Collins said, "We teamed up to put in standards for when to buy and when not to buy," she said.

"Those standards are probably not being followed," she said. Last week Collins and Levin wrote a letter to U.S. Secretary of Energy Samuel Borman, urging him to temporarily suspend buying oil for the Strategic Petroleum Reserves.

"There is no immediate need to buy oil," Collins said. "The reserves already contain nearly 700 million barrels of oil."

Senator Collins was taking advantage of the Congressional recess to come back to Maine to attend special events, visit with constituents and supporters, and check in with local town offices.

On Friday morning she was in East Boothbay where she christened the new Mark V.1 Special Operations Craft at Hodgdon Yachts. The senator secured $10 million in funding which launched the project, which could become a $200 million procurement for the U.S. Navy. Later, during a lunch in Wiscasset, she and members of her staff talked with Wiscasset Town Manager Arthur Faucher.

Asked about the health and safety issues involved in the controversial coal gasification plant proposed for Wiscasset last summer by National RE/sources, Collins said, "The federal permitting process is quite rigorous."

Whether or not the plant is built here is a local matter, she said. A vote last November on changing the town's height ordinance to allow the permitting process for the plant to go forward was defeated.

"This is a decision for the people here to make," she said. Referring to the extensive newspaper coverage which preceded the fall vote, Collins said, "There seemed to be a lot of unanswered questions on people's minds, including the amount of mercury emissions and how the coal would be transported."

If the project comes back, Collins said her role would be limited to "making sure that the federal permitting process is open, fair and thorough."

"I would not try to influence this one way or the other - just make sure it is a balanced process," she said.

Asked about the likelihood of another nuclear power plant being built here, Collins said, "The country as a whole is taking a second look at nuclear power because there are no greenhouse gases." The problem of storing spent fuel continues, even though ratepayers for years have been contributing to the cost to dispose of it, she said.

"There is also a lot of interest in funding alternate sources of energy because we are far too dependent on oil," she said.

Collins said she and U.S. Senator Olympia Snowe are both opposing the federal government's imposition of rules on the type of rope that lobstermen must use, a measure supposedly designed to prevent right whales from being entangled in the lines.

"This is imposing a real hardship on them," she said. "And in some cases, it's just not real practical. It doesn't take into consideration the fact that the ropes won't last long on the rocky bottom."

"All of us want to protect the whales, but we don't want to hurt the lobstermen. I wish the federal government would learn to work with the lobstermen - they are willing to help work out the best solution. They resent the heavy arm of government coming down on them."

During a lunch earlier in the day on Friday, Town Manager Arthur Faucher said one of the issues he brought up with the senator was the proposed bypass route. The state Department of Transportation has come up with several variations of a Route 1 bypass, all of which start just south of the village, and come out either on the mainland in Edgecomb or on Davis Island in Edgecomb

"I wanted to explain to the senator that we are not against a bypass, but that most residents feel the proposed route is too close to the village," Faucher said.

"I told her the townspeople would like to see the road built north of the high school."

What federal grants are available to support the development of working harbors was another topic they discussed, Faucher said. Although the town recently applied for a state SHIP (Small Harbor Improvement Program) grant to fix or replace the town's docks and piers, he noted that the state only has about $1 million to award to all the municipalities that apply.

They also talked about the extensive electrical infrastructure in Wiscasset and the possibilities offered by the Green Line project, proposed by the New England Independent Transmission Co., LLC. First presented to the town in December of 2006, this project would build a converter station near the former Maine Yankee Nuclear plant site to convert AC power to DC, then send it via an underwater cable to South Boston, to bring more power to that area. Although the plant has been dismantled, Maine Yankee still owns about 200 acres on the Back River, where the spent fuel is stored in cement casks.