In his recent op-ed, Jim Guerra of the Municipal Review Committee characterized the decision that many area communities are facing about where to send their trash as a matter of trust.

It is, but trust in the MRC is misplaced.

The MRC has stopped being an objective, honest broker for the towns it represents and instead has become a developer in a highly speculative venture that requires towns to give up control of their waste and turn over millions of dollars that belongs to the people of those towns.

That money, more than $25 million today, has come not from the MRC but mostly from the sound and efficient operation of the Penobscot Energy Recover Company facility in Orrington, which for nearly three decades has turned trash from towns from throughout the eastern half of Maine into clean, renewable electricity.

The PERC facility has been well run and well maintained by its employees and owners, and, according to an analysis last year by an international engineering firm, it can operate successfully for at least another 20 years.

The MRC, on the other hand, wants to use your money to build an entirely new facility, using an unproven combination of technologies and processes that does not exist anywhere else in North America today.

The developer they have partnered with, Fiberight, has a small demonstration project in Virginia (using a different combination of equipment than would be used in Maine), but a commercial facility in Iowa on the scale proposed for Maine never got off the ground following six years of missed deadlines and empty promises.

Even as MRC leaders like Guerra rush to get Maine towns to sign up, the Fiberight project has yet to receive a single permit or regulatory approval, and many municipal leaders are correctly raising questions about the MRC’s motives and role in this venture.

Serious questions also have been raised about Fiberight’s requirement that all municipal waste, including recyclable materials and organic waste, be sent to its facility. Just throw it all together and we’ll take care of it, they say, yet industry experience shows — and leading environmentalists agree — that separating waste at the community level has far better results.

Just ask the people of Montgomery, Alabama, who are on the hook for a $35 million mixed waste materials recovery facility, known in the business as a “dirty MRF” and similar to what Fiberight would use. It was built in 2014 and closed down a year later.

Or closer to home, listen to the Natural Resources Council of Maine, whose sustainability director recently wrote: ” … sustaining PERC, combined with improved community-based waste separation, recycling and composting programs represents the best path forward for the foreseeable future. Fiberight would lead us in the wrong direction.”

Instead of demanding that communities send all their waste to its facility, PERC has actively supported Maine’s Solid Waste Management Hierarchy (reduce, reuse, recycle, compost, etc.) and is actively working with other Maine companies to support the hierarchy, even though it means less municipal trash will be coming to its plant.

We have teamed up with WasteZero, a leader in waste reduction programs that already works with many Maine towns; Casella, experts in recycling, collection and trucking, and landfill operations; and Exeter Agri-Energy, which operates two state-of-the-art anaerobic digesters for processing food and animal waste on a fifth-generation dairy farm just up I-95 in Exeter.

Everything that the MRC and Fiberight are promising is already available from PERC and its team. These facilities are already permitted and working well, and none of them is looking for taxpayer subsidies or guarantees.

The MRC says, “Hand over your money and trust us.” Even the head of Fiberight says that the project is “a leap of faith” — a very expensive leap. That’s just not good enough given all that is at stake here, and it’s certainly not the role that the MRC has traditionally played as agent for the towns that use PERC. And since many of these municipalities also have an ownership interest in PERC, the MRC is essentially asking them to use the money they have earned from PERC to build a new facility that will compete with one that they already own.

That’s not a trust relationship. It’s a self-serving power grab using other peoples’ money.

Bob Knudsen is vice president of USA Energy Group LLC, the majority owner and managing partner of the Penobscot Energy Recovery Company waste-to-energy facility in Orrington.