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AUGUSTA, Maine — Till attack ads do us part.
A man whose wedding Maine Senate hopeful Troy Jackson officiated during the pandemic is now throwing his weight behind incumbent Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) in a scathing new ad.
Ronnie Pelletier, a firefighter from Jackson’s hometown of Allagash, ripped into Jackson over a cellphone tower the former Maine Senate president secured in the rural town on the property of his de facto in-laws.
“A few years ago, I was working for the town, and a couple of gentlemen came into the office,” Pelletier recalled in the ad. “The gentleman from the cell phone tower company had told me that the best reception and coverage would be from the schoolhouse lot that the town owns.”
“Maybe a day later, Troy Jackson had pulled into my driveway,” he added.
“He was riding them around, showing them the sites. So after Troy Jackson got involved showing them the sights. The tower was then built on one of Troy’s family members’ properties, and the tower went down there.”
“Make of it what you will.”
Telecoms companies pay rent for the cell towers they install on people’s land. It’s unclear how much Jackson’s in-laws are making, but rural cell towers can pay $500 to $1,000 a month, according to one industry site.
Robert Parsloe, the owner of Wireless Partners, LLC, which installed the cellphone tower in Allagash strongly disputed Pelletier’s insinuations and insisted it was just a coincidence that it was placed on the property of Jackson’s relatives.
“It’s just really expensive to build new towers. It’s a pain. You alienate people,” Parsloe explained.
“We found this area … we knew nothing about landowners at that point.”
“We found a willing landowner,” he said. “God forbid! I doubt you would want to put one of these ugly towers on your land, and I certainly wouldn’t want to put one on my land. And so we were grateful that somebody said, ‘Sure, put it up there.'”
Parsloe acknowledged that is company looked at various options including the schoolhouse before landing on the location it chose.
The effort came during the pandemic, and Allagash’s residents previously had to route their calls through Canada because service was so sparse.
“Nobody can talk us into [something] because we’re not going to talk the big carriers into [going] on to Billy Bob’s land and make a decision because that’s a long-term financial commitment for those carriers,” he stressed.
Allies of Jackson have also strongly disputed Ronnie Pelletier’s characterization of events, insisting that he didn’t have undue influence on the tower being constructed on his family’s property.
Jackson grew up in Allagash — a tiny speck of a town with 234 people, about 25 miles from the Canadian bornder — and attended the local school system there.
Louis and Patricia, who aren’t related to Ronnie Pelletier, are the parents of Lana Pelletier, who is Jackson’s longtime partner and the mother of his children.
Notably, Lana Pelletier is Jackson’s second cousin as they share great-grandparents, the Maine Wire reported.
Ronnie Pelletier gained national attention for an interview he did with MS NOW, where he bashed Jackson and credited Collins for having a stronger debate performance against him.
“I watched it, and then I read all the comments, and it was not good,” he told the outlet. “You looked at Troy’s attitude, and it’s like he was insulted to be there. He got pissed. He either does not do well under pressure, or he does not get along with others.”
“He’s going from a small pond into the big ocean, and it’s not going to end well,” he added.
Collins currently has a 0.2 percentage point edge over Jackson in the latest RealClearPolitics aggregate of polls.
She has a history of dramatically overperforming polls, particularly in the 2020 election cycle.