The legal battle over Plum Creek’s Moosehead Lake development plan is headed to Maine’s highest court.
Justices on the Maine Supreme Judicial Court will hear oral arguments Tuesday on appeals stemming from the September 2009 decision by the Land Use Regulation Commission to rezone nearly 400,000 acres of Plum Creek land in the North Woods.
The major issue before the justices is whether to uphold or overturn a lower court decision ordering LURC to reopen hearings on the Plum Creek case because of procedural errors. But Plum Creek’s opponents are hoping the high court will delve deeper and invalidate altogether one of the largest, costliest and most contentious rezoning cases in Maine history.
Attorneys won’t have much time to plead their cases, however. Both sides will have just 15 minutes to present their oral arguments and answer justices’ questions, which is standard in cases that reach the Supreme Court.
“We have to triage how we use our time very carefully,” said Phil Worden, an attorney representing the Forest Ecology Network and RESTORE: The North Woods, two groups fighting to overturn the LURC decision.
Plum Creek’s housing and resort plan essentially has been on hold for more than two years due to various appeals, although the company has implemented — on an interim basis — several massive land conservation deals that were key to winning LURC’s blessing.
“Nothing is happening on the ground,” Mark Doty, a spokesman for Plum Creek in Maine, said Friday when asked about the development plan. “We are taking this one step at a time and are focusing on the appeal.”
The Seattle-based company’s Moosehead Lake proposal was historic in multiple respects.
The nearly 1,000 house lots and two large resorts envisioned in the 30-year concept plan represent the largest development plan in state history, although Plum Creek will have to receive additional regulatory approvals for each project.
Before seeking any of those permits, much less dig a single cellar hole, Plum Creek was required to permanently conserve roughly 400,000 acres in the region through a combination of conservation easements and land sales. At the time, that deal ranked as the second-largest conservation package in U.S. history.
Nearly 500 Mainers testified at public hearings across the state and more than a thousand more submitted comments on all sides of the issue. Opponents decried the proposal as an egregious case of “wilderness sprawl” in Maine’s famed North Woods. Supporters, on the other hand, predicted the plan would create construction and tourism jobs, provide predictability to the forest products industry and guarantee public access to vast swaths of land for recreation.
But in April 2011, Maine Superior Court Justice Thomas Humphrey ordered LURC to reopen hearings on the issue, saying commissioners violated their own procedural rules by adopting a substantially rewritten rezoning application without first holding a public hearing. Plum Creek and the Maine Department of Conservation appealed that ruling to the state supreme court.
Humphrey rejected the roughly half-dozen other arguments made by the Forest Ecology Network, RESTORE and the Natural Resources Council of Maine in their appeals of the LURC decision. Those issues may be considered by the Supreme Court, however.
Jerry Reid, the assistant attorney general handling the state’s appeal, declined to comment on Tuesday’s hearing. But the state argued in briefs filed with the court that, contrary to Humphrey’s opinion, LURC’s rules allow the commission to make changes to an application and solicit written comments rather than hold additional hearings.
Rebutting claims made by the three organizations fighting to overturn LURC’s decision, the state’s attorneys also wrote that it makes no sense to require LURC, as a planning agency, to either accept or reject applications without working with the applicants.
“To fulfill its statutory charge the commission must be permitted both to evaluate and then explain [to applicants] what sound planning legally means and requires,” the brief reads. “It did that here by amending Plum Creek’s proposal based on the record to render it a publicly beneficial land-use plan, all according to an open process with abundant opportunities for public participation.”
Although it has been more than two years since LURC rendered its decision, Cathy Johnson with the Natural Resources Council of Maine said people are still upset with the outcome.
“Hardly a week goes by that I don’t hear from people saying, ‘What is going on with Plum Creek?’” Johnson said. “I don’t think the passion has declined at all. I think the day-to-day knowledge of what is going on with Plum Creek has declined.”
Creation a huge resort/condo pleasure zone for the rich, which will destroy and taint huge areas of a real treasure of natural beauty in Maine, is a serious sin of greed, pride and shortsightedness.
The housing market crashed in 2008, and there is serious likelihood that the original business climate around this development is dead, and that the project is now just a boondoggle.
Human greed destroys, human virtue thrives.
All of which you own absolutely no part of.
Greed…………. Is that what it’s called. After paying taxes on a large chunk of land for years and years in an unorganized township, recieving no services for the taxes that you’ve paid and then your told that you can’t do as you wish with that land. This is Ridiculous!!!! The real greed here is from the moonbats that think they can control what someone else wants to do with their own land that they pay taxes on.
There is something strange going on here. The principle of property rights applies at the Plum Creek site but not at the coming National Park footprint. I wish somebody could explain that to me.
Here is my view on your question. Plum Creek will be keeping the land privately owned to my knowledge. Quimby wants to give the tax payers her land. Meaning she is trying to give up here right to the property. Now if Quimby wanted to keep her land, keep paying taxes on it, I would care less about what she did with her land. But she wants to give it to the tax payers. That is the difference to me.
As a preservationist, believe me, I know all about the sour side of property owners exercising their rights. Plum Creek is all about making money for its owners. A new NP is RQ making a priceless donation to America and its people and their remote posterity. Long after Plum Creek is a wasteland a national park will continue to augment in value as is easily seen by the examples that stretch from coast to coast. It would also be a boost to the local economy. No amount of bad mouthing by the locals can make that fact go away. Neither application contravenes the rights of a property owner. Nobody gets to pick and choose applications of the law according to how they feel about each individual property use. Always excepting of course unless one is from the nocketts and have special powers far beyond those of mortal men.
Well I am not from nocketts so I must have special power far beyond those of mortal men. Can’t wait to tell the wife that.
What really gets me is that Quimby has made it very clear that she has no intentions of ever cutting trees on her land, therefore, she should be forced to withdraw her land from tree growth tax and pay the stiff penalties that go along with them. Also if Quimby doesn’t what vehicles driving her roads on her land she should be made to discontinue these roads and put them to bed. This would require removing all culverts, backsloping the banks, seeding the slopes, etc. to prevent further erosion that is being caused by her roads that are washing out because of the lack of maintenance. All I am asking is that Quimby be treated like all other landowners in Maine. The money collected from tree growth penalties and the money spent on local contractors discontinuing her roads would financially benefit the community more than the creation of a wilderness park thatp nqobody will come visit because there are no roads. If Quimby wants a park so bad I suggest she does just as Plum Creek is trying to do, spend her own money creating it. If her park is a success then she can turn it over to the feds. If it’s a flop then she saves money for all of the U.S. taxpayers.
Wood Chopper
I can see your point, but sorry, I don’t see it as being much more than a quibble in the universal scheme of things. The big forest companies, paper companies, and landowners, ect ect. have gamed the system, twisted through every loophole, slithered through every statutory ambiguity, bought every public official, elected or apponted, that they needed, bulldozed the spirit of any semblance of fair play in every statute imaginable for a century and a half. They have taken the public interest out behind the barn for years and put the wood to us, and wailed the beJesus out of us till we are black, blue and yellow. I just can’t see, given the value and vision of RQ’s proposal; to get myself worked up to the point my shorts are in a knot , and howl and rave in tongues, over whether RQ is the virgin mary, and her wonderful plan is derived from an immaculate conception. It is what it is, and, I think its good for Maine and America on on many levels. Win or lose my hat is off to this woman.
Plum Creek is known to be a greed propelled corporation that buys land as speculators, rapes it, develops it and cuts and runs right to the greedy bank to make more money on the money they get from their incredibly destructive practices. I don’t care who owns the land; no one should have the right to destroy it! Especially the rapidly disappearing wilderness. All of a sudden “people from away” become the harbingers of land rights issues? What about the rights of the land and all of its creatures. Down with Plum Creek and their BS.
There is no place in Maine or any other state where you can do whatever you want on your own land-taxes paid or not. If your next door neighbor in the middle of a Portland subdivison wants to add four stories to his home can he do that? Probably not, as it affects others, and so does this. This project will get done in some form with compromise from everyone involved. The Moosehead area needs this if it’s done right for the environment.
Wood Chopper should know, if he really chops wood, that the tax rate on UT woodland is approximately $1/acre per the Tree Growth Tax law. Also note that Plum Creek will continue paying this outlandishly low tax rate on all its land, including those acres to be rezoned for development (which includes waterfront property) until the land is sold, at which time, of course they will pay no taxes. One dollar per acre for waterfront property on Moosehead Lake? Would that we all could get it that cheaply.
Arnt we just borrowing this from our children,…..this is not ours to screw up…………..
Hope their not receiving the tree growth tax break as this landowner is defenitly taking advantage of a huge tax break while waiting to make a huge profit that has nothing to do with tree growth. $100 per running foot with a reasonable setback say 200 feet for any water frontage would be a good place to start. Be good for Roxane Quimby and any other organization that is trying to limit public access to the great outdoors.
Hmmm,.. will RESTORE, NRCM and other “environmental groups” bring suit against Quimby and her plans to subdivide Elliotsville?…. doubtful,… I’ll let you figure out why..?!?!
When everybody stops calling Plum Creek’s scheme a “development plan” maybe we can begin to talk turkey. According to Plum Creek their primary “plan” is to quadruple the balance sheet value of their land simply by conning us into rezoning it for possible development. PC does not plan to build a condo, a resort, or even an outhouse. Theirs is a “concept plan” which is a term conceived of by LURC years ago but never intended to deal with such a massive concept. LURC admitted such in the beginning. In the beginning Governor Baldacci had the same vision for “development” of our north woods.