Coalition Meeting and Holiday Open House
The next Coalition meeting is tentatively scheduled for Thursday December 14th at 3:00 p.m. @ the Coalition Information Center at the Community House in Greenville. We’ll also be holding an Open House and Holiday Party immediately following the meeting. For more information, please contact the Coalition Information Center at 1-888- 702-7466.

Probable UT Study Commission Recommendations
The Commission to Study the Cost of Providing Certain Services in the Unorganized Territories is putting together its recommendations in preparation for its final meeting next week.

With the composition of the UT changing over the past 20 years - where traditional seasonal camps once owned by local people who neither wanted nor expected municipal-type services are being replaced in some areas by million-dollar vacation homes whose out-of-state owners expect road maintenance, police protection and fire coverage for their investments – there is a need to educate potential property owners in the UT of the limited services available.

Municipal services in the more than 9.4 million acres of the UT are provided by either the state or county governments. Taxes generated in the UT fund the services, including the planning and zoning board functions provided by the Land Use Regulation Commission.

As development occurs in more remote areas, however, the cost of these services increase, adding pressure to forest fire suppression, search and rescues, police and fire protection, and septic waste and garbage disposal.

With an eye on that future development, it is expected the commission next week will forward to the Legislature recommendations and proposed legislation as follows:

• For LURC: Restore five positions eliminated during budget cuts a few years ago. The cost of the added positions could be offset in part by a proposed increase in assessments to the UT, towns and plantations and a revision in permit fees which already is in the pipeline. Develop a brochure detailing the services in the UTs.
• For Maine Forest Service: Purchase three Bell helicopters over the next four years for forest fire suppression; restore funds lost to budget cuts over the last four years and fund four of 11 positions lost to budget cuts.
• For counties: Give authority to counties to charge service fees to the recipients of "municipal" services provided in the UT.
• For education: Discontinue providing for or reimbursing parents for student transportation over private roads starting in 2009-2010.
• For the Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife: Work with landowners, towns and wilderness recreation groups to explore and make recommendations for the distribution of responsibility and costs for wilderness rescue services among state, town and individual parties.
• For government: Provide a process for areas with significant population and property valuation to organize, similar to the deorganization process.

Taxing Tourism Debate Begins
Disputing the recommendation in a Brookings Institution report released last month which calls for a 3% increase in the state’s lodging tax to 10%, the Maine Tourism Association suggested this week that Maine's $7.5 million tourism budget should be doubled or even tripled, but the money should not come from an increase in the lodging and restaurant tax.

The Maine Tourism Association believes that raising the tax on meals and hotel rooms could hurt Maine’s largest industry, which generates $2.3 billion in lodging and restaurant sales and supports 177,000 Maine jobs.

National Park Supporters Plead Their Case in the New York Times
This article appeared in the November 7, 2006 edition of the New York Times:

In Maine, a Public Park in Search of Public Support

MILLINOCKET, Me. - Roxanne Quimby could be forgiven if she thought she was emulating the likes of Henry David Thoreau, Percival P. Baxter, John D. Rockefeller Jr. and other lovers of Maine’s landscape when she started to buy bits of the vast northern woodlands near here to be the core of a new national park.

Who knew that when she began using some of the fortune she had earned from her organic personal- care business, Burt’s Bees, to buy up woods to preserve, she would be greeted with “Ban Roxanne” T-shirts? Or, that her efforts at preservation — banning snowmobiling, hunting and all-terrain vehicles on 50,000 of her acres — would be taken as an attack on the old-time values of the timberland?

Who knew that even some conservation-minded groups would be reluctant to support the decade-old vision of a national park that had inspired Ms. Quimby? Still, one might have guessed, looking at the streets of this town of 4,700 people, where hunter’s blaze orange is the fall fashion statement of choice during this month’s deer hunting season.

Millinocket residents fear that turning timberland into parkland will further cut timber jobs, strip them of their accustomed hunting grounds and prevent the development of resorts and snowmobile parks they see as one way out of the downward economic spiral.

“What Roxanne and the others want to do, they want to create a park up here the size of Connecticut and take it out of the heartland of the Maine forest,” Eugene Conlogue, the town’s manager, said in an interview. “That’s a nonstarter for us.”

Other environmental groups, while sympathetic to the idea of a national park, see it as an unwelcome distraction from their fight to block a proposed 420,000-acre resort development that the Plum Creek Timber Company has unveiled for Moosehead Lake, just west of here. As Brownie Carson, executive director of the Natural Resources Council of Maine, said, “You can’t pour energy into protection of a single area, even though it’s large and hugely important, without risking losses, big losses, in other really important areas of Maine’s North Woods forest.”

Thirty years ago, Ms. Quimby was living a subsistence counterculture life in the North Woods. After building her financial empire, she was taken with an idea conceived a decade ago by Jym St. Pierre and other local conservationists for a Maine Woods National Park that would envelop Baxter State Park, in the conservation equivalent of Russian nesting dolls. The new park would be the size of Yellowstone and Yosemite combined. “I find it pretty ironic, or humorous, that people make a national park out to be such a radical idea,” said Ken Spalding, the project coordinator for the moving force behind the park, Restore, a group with offices in Hallowell and in Concord, Mass. “American people love their national parks.”

Ms. Quimby, 56, hopes Mr. Spalding and Restore’s director, Mr. St. Pierre, are right. The idea of a park, she said, “floats my boat.” She prefers that her 75,000 acres become a base on which Restore’s 3.2- million acre park could be built. But in the past few weeks, she has started to explore conservation alternatives and has met with her opponents to see if her goals to bring the northlands back to their pre- logging state can be reconciled with their goals of finding economic value and personal freedom in the same woods.

In the last six years, more than six million acres of timber company land have changed hands. Timber companies have come and gone like truckers at a roadside stop. “What has happened over the years,” Ms. Quimby said, “is that there were very few landowners and they had a very permissive policy toward land use as long as you stayed out of the way of the logging operation. So people had this unrestricted access.”

“So now that the ownership is changing,” she said, “it’s becoming quite clear that this is private property. And as a private property owner I don’t have to let anybody on it.” That, she added, “is becoming the alternative to public land.”

When Ms. Quimby banned snowmobiling and hunting and all-terrain vehicles from the first two tracts she bought, which totaled more than 50,000 acres, the “ban Roxanne” cries were heard everywhere here. When she bought her third tract, 23,000 acres, earlier this fall, adjacent to the critical parcel in a state-brokered deal to expand Baxter park, opponents erupted again.

This time, Ms. Quimby sat down and met with them and made a deal. For at least a year, snowmobiles and hunters could continue to use the new purchase, called Sandy Stream. In the meantime, the competing visions of the North Woods’ future could be debated with less pressure. “Mainers are more individualistic.” she said. “They’re used to having more space about them. They are very self-sufficient, including in the way they think about things.”

It is not clear whether Ms. Quimby’s efforts at appeasement will beget a more conciliatory attitude to other conservation deals, particularly the not-yet- completed purchase of land around Katahdin Lake. This is a place whose haunting views of Maine’s largest mountain have been a magnet for American landscape painters, from Frederic Church on.

Patrick McGowan, the commissioner of Maine’s Department of Conservation, has spent months trying to put all the pieces in place to add 6,000 acres to the eastern side of the 204,800-acre Baxter State Park, ensuring that Katahdin Lake, the artists’ beaches and the surrounding woodlands would be preserved. The deal was buffeted on its way through the Maine Legislature, but survived, with two provisos. Mr. McGowan, aided by the nonprofit conservation group, The Trust for Public Lands, had to get $14 million in private donations to complete the purchase. Facing a Dec. 15 deadline, he is more than $3 million shy of the goal. The Trust is organizing fund-raising events, and artists like Evelyn Dunphy are donating canvases of Katahdin.

The second proviso was that one-third of the new parkland— though not the area around lake — had to be open to “traditional” uses like hunting and snowmobiling. That deal was barely done when Ms. Quimby announced the purchase of her latest, 23,000 acre, tract from a local logging operator.

Hunters saw the Quimby announcement as a double blow. They were losing access to 23,000 acres, and those acres were the main way in to the 2,000 acres of proposed parkland set aside for them. “Everybody perceived this as a threat,” said Bob Cram, a local hunter and a director of the statewide hunters’ group, the Sportsmen’s Alliance of Maine. “I did, too.”

How Ms. Quimby’s talks with the hunters’ groups will change the landscape is unknown. Acadia and Baxter parks faced opposition before their creation. It took decades to assemble the land and gain legislative approval. Mr. Spalding, of Restore, said: “The opposition is very much a minority. It is clear that the Maine public, statewide, overwhelmingly supports the acquisition of more public land for conservation.”

For the moment, the conservation will likely continue to be ad hoc, with individuals like Ms. Quimby, groups like the Appalachian Mountain Trail Club and state- private partnerships raising the money for individual tracts. These might be combined in a national park, a national forest or a state preserve. They might also remain private, part of a checkerboard of conservation areas and resort development. A national park, Ms. Quimby said, is not the only solution.

“I think a national forest is a possibility, like the White Mountain National Forest,” she said. “It has much broader usage.” “Everyone has to give up something in a compromise,” she said. “But you get your most important things if it’s a good compromise.”

Mars Hill Wind Power Project
Evergreen Wind Power has completed construction of more than half of the towers for a 28-turbine wind farm on Mars Hill Mountain that is expected to start generating electricity before the end of the year.

The windmills that will be situated on the crest of Mars Hill Mountain were fabricated in three sections each, then lifted into place by large cranes. Fully constructed, each tower will be more than 260 feet tall. The 115-foot blades are being hoisted into place on the turbines.

When completed, the project will become New England’s biggest wind-power development. At full capacity, it is expected to provide the equivalent power needs of 45,000 average Maine homes.

Jobs Coming to Madawaska
Madawaska got a welcome boost this week with two new stores opening in town.

This week, Marden’s Surplus and Salvage Co. opened its 13th store in Maine at the former Ames shopping center, bringing 70 to 80 new full and part-time jobs.

Last week, Plourde’s Harley-Davidson opened up on Maine Street. Plourde’s Harley-Davidson is a clothing and accessories satellite store to Plourde and Plourde Inc., a Caribou Harley-Davidson dealer.

Poplar Hill Project Set To Move Forward
Plans to build 40 houses on the shores of Brassua Lake are moving ahead.

In 2004, the Land Use Regulation Commission approved a "concept plan" proposing 60 residential lots on or near Brassua Lake, located on the Moose River just west of Rockwood.

The original landowner developed about 10 of the lots and then sold much of the remaining developable land in June 2006 to a group of local residents and business owners operating under the name Poplar Hill, LLC.

The new owners are now seeking LURC approval to proceed with a planned 40-lot shorefront subdivision on the Poplar Hill peninsula on the lake’s eastern shore. Poplar Hill, LLC must abide by all terms of the 2004 concept plan, including setting aside green spaces and respecting permanent conservation easements.

The lots will range from 2 to 4 acres in size with an anticipated price tag of $200,000 to $225,000. Construction is expected to begin by spring 2007.

Bangor Foreign Policy Forum
At the Bangor Foreign Policy Forum this week, a professor of management and international business at the UMaine Business School stated that Maine must advertise its resources to foreign companies in its effort to capture and retain business opportunities and stimulate the economy.

26 foreign-based companies employ workers in Maine, including Nestle of Switzerland, parent company of water-bottler Poland Springs; Emera of Canada, which owns Bangor Hydro Electric Co.; Angostura International Ltd. of Trinidad & Tobago, a gourmet food manufacturer and distributor; and Fjord Seafood ASA of Norway, owner of Ducktrap River Fish Farm.

In 2004, 6.4% of Maine’s private sector employees worked for foreign companies, placing it eighth among all states in terms of the percentage of the work force employed by foreign corporations. This represents an increase of almost 48% over the last five years.

Maine’s proximity to the Canadian market and its natural resources make it a suitable match for its resident industries. To retain these companies, Maine must produce more workers with college degrees and elected officials must clearly decide which industries and countries it wishes to pursue.

Read the Plum Creek Plan
Please check out a website dedicated to providing information about the revised Plum Creek plan.

You should also be able to access the EMDC study as well as ITS trail maps from this website.

Read the EMDC Study of the Plum Creek Plan Impacts
For the complete EMDC impact study, go to the following link on the LURC website:
http://mainegov- images.informe.org/doc/lurc/reference/resourceplans/ moosehead/2006-08-18appb.pdf

[Caution: This is a very large file and may take a long time to download.]

Upcoming Events of Interest
May 2007 - Public Hearings on Plum Creek Plan: The Land Use Regulation Commission (LURC) has announced that the public hearings for the Plum Creek plan will tentatively be in mid-to-late May 2007. We’ll keep you up to date as details follow.

email: info@preservegrowme.org
phone: 888-702-7466
web: http://www.preservegrowme.org