SOUTH PORTLAND – South Portland moved one step closer to possibly solving its tar sands problem Monday, although that step was a tough, two-hour slog of deciding exactly what form that next step should take.

With a pool of 12 applicants now in hand from which it will staff a three-person Draft Ordinance Committee, which will be asked to craft some means of banning tar sands from transport through South Portland, the City Council will make appointments at its next meeting on Jan. 22.

At that session, to be held on a Wednesday due to the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. holiday, each councilor will rank the applicants from one point (top choice) to 10 (least preferred). The applicants receiving the three lowest scores will be appointed at that meeting.

However, while the city has declined to release resume information submitted by the 12 applicants, providing names and municipalities of residence only, it will rank them in public session. According to Mayor Jerry Jalbert, if technical issues can be resolved in time, the rankings of each councilor will be displayed on a screen as they are tallied.

“If there’s going to be a No. 1, there’s going to be a No. 12,” said Councilor Michael Pock. “That might be a little embarrassing for someone.”

In order to cast a wide net for committee members well versed in land-use regulations, the City Council opened the application process to people living outside South Portland. Submissions were slow to trickle in. Two days before the Jan. 8 deadline, just two applications had been turned in, prompting several residents at the Jan. 6 council meeting to call for an extension. However, councilors brushed off those requests, correctly predicting a last-minute flurry of applications.

The 12 people from which the council will pick its ordinance authors include Carly M. Andersen of Biddeford,

Cynthia Dill of Cape Elizabeth, Orlando E. Delogu, Russell B. Pierce Jr. and Eliot H. Stanley, all of Portland,

and Malcolm Poole of Scarborough, along with South Portland residents Michael J. Conathan,

David Critchfield,

Karen Lewis, Ebon Rose, Peter Stanton and

Carol Thorne.

Andersen, Dill and Pierce are all attorneys, while Delogu, who also responded to the city’s call for a professional facilitator to guide the committee, is a professor emeritus at the University of Maine School of Law.

Andersen is a Pittsburgh, Pa., native who was licensed to practice law in Maine just this past year, while Dill, who specializes in civil rights cases, is a former state legislator and U.S. Senate candidate. Of the three, Pierce, with 20 years at the bar, seems to have the most experience in relevant casework. His biography on the website of Portland law firm Norman Hanson DeTroy says, “He currently represents one of Maine’s leading environmental organizations.”

Pierce and Delogu both signed a letter released by Protect South Portland in October in support of the Waterfront Protection Ordinance (WPO), a failed ballot attempt to ban tar sands.

That letter rebutted a rallying cry of WPO opposition, that it was too broad and could leave extreme collateral damage to South Portland’s working waterfront.

Environmental work is a theme that runs through many of the remaining committee candidates.

Critchfield has been chairman of South Portland’s Conservation Commission since 2009. He is president and CEO of Emsource Inc., a company that describes itself as being “in the business of acquiring other companies’ environmental liabilities.”

Poole is president of Shurtleff Stormwater Solutions, a seller of surface water pollution control systems. The holder of a 50-ton commercial captain’s license who delivers ships up and down the Atlantic seaboard, he also is current president of the Friends of Casco Bay. In November, South Portland residents Rosemarie De Angelis and David Orbeton demanded Councilor Pock recuse himself from proceedings related to the tar-sands issue because he has a history of performing carpentry work for the Poole family. Poole, they claimed publicly, owns a Fore River pier, has ties to the petroleum industry and campaigned last year against passage of the WPO, designed to block tar sands. That, they said, was enough to compromise Pock’s impartiality.

Conathan is director of ocean policy at the Center for American Progress, where his work, according to an author’s biography attached to his thinkprogress.org blog posts about South Portland’s yearlong tar-sands debate, “focuses on driving progressive solutions to the multitude of problems facing the world’s oceans.” Conathan also was a staffer for former U.S. Sen. Olympia Snowe, for whom he reportedly authored several pieces of environmental legislation.

Of the rest, Stanley, Rose and Stanton have all been outspoken opponents of diluted bitumen, more popularly known as tar sands. Stanley, as a member of the Sebago Lake Anglers Association, has spoken at several Lakes Region municipal meetings against allowing the heavy crude oil to flow though the region, while Rose, a student with multiple degrees, including one in geology, has addressed the South Portland City Council often enough that he was able to joke Monday about being “on a first name basis.”

Meanwhile, Stanton, a Deake Street neighbor of Natalie West – who authored the WPO narrowly defeated at the polls in November, leading the City Council to vote for a moratorium on tar-sands distribution to support a second go at regulating it – once worked in the oil and gas industry but has more recently been a prolific author of letters to the editor vilifying the product.

Of the two other candidates, Lewis, a graduate of Harvard University, is owner of Uncommon Kitchen & Bath, a design and installation company located on Ocean Street. Lastly, Thorne is a real estate agent who served on the South Portland Planning Board for 15 years, from 1996 to 2011.

“It is an interesting mix,” said Jalbert. “I think the council is quite happy that we chose to extend the eligibility beyond the city limits.”

Also at Monday’s meeting the council seemed to settle on Edelstein Associates of East Waterboro as its choice to lead the ad hoc Draft Ordinance Committee through its deliberations. The council will vote on a formal contract, as well as a budget and funding source for Edelstein’s service, at the Jan. 22 meeting.

Five replies to the city’s “request for qualifications” for committee facilitators were opened at city hall on Jan. 8. In addition to Edelstein and Delogu, the applicants included independent planning consultant Nicholas Bournakel of Portland, planning firm Good Group Decisions of Brunswick and management coaching company SM Gallant of Falmouth.

Delogu offered the lowest fee, described as a “pro-bono rate,” of $25 per hour, with an upper limit of $5,000.

Edelstein requested $200 per hour, plus an additional fee of $50 per hour for “note taking and initial preparation of meeting summaries.”

Of the rest, Bournakel asked for $75 per hour for his services, while Good Group Decision’s rate varied from $90 to $150 per hour, depending on which person it put on the job at any given time. Gallant’s rate was similarly varied. About 20 percent of its work would be handled by an employee at $75 per hour, while company founder Susan M. Gallant would handle about 80 percent of the workload, at $1,200 per day, pro-rated to $150 per hour.

All but Delogu requested reimbursement for travel expenses, while Good Group Decisions wanted the city to cover costs for parking, meals, lodging and “transportation tickets.”

City Manager Jim Gailey, Assistant City Manager Jon Jennings and Finance Director Greg L’Heureux graded each of the facilitator bids using a weighted scale. That scale based 30 percent of each evaluator’s assigned score on the applicant’s “qualifications and related experience in facilitation,” 20 percent each on “understanding of issues related to the project,” “process approach and methodology,” and “compensation,” with 10 percent reserved for general “response to proposal.”

Edelstein Associates received the highest average score (82.3), followed by Good Group Decisions (78.0), SM Gallant (62.3), Bournakel (45.7) and Delogu (45.0). Jennings and L’Heureux each gave their highest grade to Edelstein 90 and 75, respectively while Gailey, who gave Edelstein a score of 82, favored Good Group Decisions, assigning it an 85. All three scored Delogu the lowest.