Over the past two years, much has been written and said about reform of the Land Use Regulation Commission, which oversees the planning, zoning and regulation of the unorganized territories and some communities in Maine.
Last year the Legislature formed a study group composed of residents, landowners, the Department of Conservation, county officials and conservation interests to produce
reform recommendations. Their recommendations have been widely praised as sound and a move in the right direction.
Much of the negative discussion about LURC reform is about potential impacts and changes to development patterns and the complexion of much of northern Maine. However, this debate misses the essential and pivotal driver of the move to reform LURC. The primary drive is local representation and oversight by elected officials.
Since its inception, LURC has been governed by a commission of gubernatorial appointees that were in many ways unanswerable to the residents of the LURC jurisdiction. Maine has a long tradition of local governance and control. The LURC jurisdiction is unique in that its
planning and zoning are subject to the input of all citizens, regardless of the location of their residence.
It is analogous to citizens of Bangor having equal standing to citizens of Augusta for matters of Augusta planning and zoning. While continuing the tradition of a central body with broad input from around the state, the proposed reforms require that representatives from the counties that contain the land in the jurisdiction serve on the commission. These representatives will be answerable to the residents of the jurisdiction and thus provide a critical and necessary level of representation of their interests.
The proposed reforms also provide a mechanism for counties to “opt out” of LURC and take on planning, zoning and regulation on their own. This is the current right of any deorganized town or plantation in the jurisdiction that currently has LURC perform these tasks for them.
In order for a county to qualify for this option, it must meet a number of rigorous requirements, prove that LURC was failing to provide adequate service and gain legislative approval. If this approval was granted but the county failed to perform its duties properly, LURC would have the right to pull the county back into its jurisdiction.
These and other proposed changes have been characterized as dangerous and an invitation to rampant exploitation and development. This is simply not the case; the residents and landowners in the jurisdiction are interested in economic development, but understand that in order to prosper, we need to build upon the area’s strength of large stretches of undeveloped working forest that provide jobs, wood supply for our mills and vast recreation and tourism opportunities.
In addition, the lack of public infrastructure and rights of way in much of the jurisdiction has, and will continue to be, a significant brake on changes in land use. It is important to bear in mind that once one gets a mile from a public road or organized town, the average rate of development in the unorganized territory has been one dwelling per 20,000-acre township per decade, or ten per century. That is hardly likely to change anytime soon, especially with the large fraction of land that is closed to development due to conservation easements.
Intelligent people can and should discuss the merits of different policies and planning decisions for the unorganized territories of northern Maine, and there is much common ground on how to move forward. What is needed is more local representation on the powerful body that provides these services to that region.
I believe that we can all agree that local representation is in the spirit of our democracy and one of the foundations of Maine governance. That is why I support the sound and reasonable reforms that are before the Legislature.
Peter Triandafillou is vice president of the woodlands division of Huber Resources Corp. He works in Old Town.
Apparently it is not true that “all agree that local representation is in the spirit of our democracy and one of the foundations of Maine governance”. The pressure group activists have been embarrassing themselves with hysterical rhetoric denouncing it in favor of their dictatorial “one voice enforced by central state control”. That includes BDN, which in an editorial denounced representative self-government accountable to local people as “pandering to voters”. The mask has slipped as the viro leftists openly reveal themselves to be the little tyrants that they are, which those who have been attacked by them have been trying to tell people for decades.
It is necessary as it is obvious that local control is a dismal failure; the local citizenry continues to demonstrate (somewhat redundantly) that it is unable to successfully regulate or maintain itself, therefore the state needs to take control. One only needs to look at the local infrastructure, local schools, and the mismangement of the local dumps in their area. Personally I’ve never “hidden” my socialist agenda, I’m quite open about it.
You think too small. The failure of socialism everywhere shows that it isn’t enough to keep people in control. Somehow the human race survived despite the destruction of entire economies and mass murders. Only intergalactic control from extra- terristrials may suffice to control humans on behalf of dead stars and black holes.
I’ll call my cousin, Darth Vader. You’ll like him. He’s not as evil as I am, but he’s good at mind control.
If you say so. As a self-proclaimed relative you would know him. Meanwhile, stop the personal, irrelevant attacks on those who reject your ideology. Statism and collectivism have a long history of destruction and failure. They are indefensible and rejected with contempt by normal people whether you like it or not.
That’s three for three if you’re keeping score, for your use of the phrase “little tyrants” in your comments; and 100% compliance with your universal attempts to vilify and demonize anyone with a different viewpoint through use of nasty-sounding words like “viros”. I also would like to point out your proclivity for making up stories about me personally (as in yesterday’s comments where you falsely accused me of supporting the National Park) and dehumanizing me by referring to me as “it”. These are the kind of tactics one might expect from someone who is trying to divert attention from the real issues at hand, and to elicit sympathy for his imagined persecution.
The viro pressure group activists like NRCM and Audubon are ideological tyrants. They oppose private property rights and demand centralized dictatorial control over other people’s lives. They explicitly denounce representative local self-government accountable to the people governed. No one has to “make this up”. They have admitted it themselves throughout their campaign, which has sounded like the slogans of 1930s European ideological dictators claiming to be more “efficient” with centrol control unobstructed by voters they control.
It is the viros who constantly demonize those who dare to stand up to them. Worse than that, they demand to use the physical power of government to impose their views. They are anti-individualist statists who have no claim to be ‘idealists’ on an alleged ‘moral high ground’.
“Viros” is an abbreviation of the mouthful “environmentalists”. It conserves letters. It reduces their footprint on the page. These are good things. Their “footprint” should be reduced everywhere, including on people’s necks.
The “earthling” has a long history of siding with LURC, the Quimby supporters and other leftist causes.
One lost sole… in need of leadership.
I don’t know or care about his personal psychology or life. Here we address the policies and philosophies underlying them, and their impact on human beings through a misanthropic wilderness preservationism and statist oppression required to impose it. They threaten our freedom to live as human individuals. “Earthling” has illustrated the worst of it in many ways, including his previous denunciation of too much human “food production”. Notice that he even picked the name “earthling” as a generic creature of earth in contrast to an individual human being, which is highly symbolic of the philosophical and political positions he has revealed about himself and which illustrate the premises of the viro ideological movement.
What the blazes are you talking about now? Denunciation of too much food production?
You’re right, I must be evil and a sociopath. I want my grandchildren to be able to hunt and fish the same way I can. Best have me arrested and re-educated in some gulag-like concentration camp before my “radical preservationist ideals” convince more people that it’s somehow a bad idea to kill off all the wildlife by destroying habitats. Now get out there and repeal those restrictions on fishing! Get rid of those foolish protections for critical habitats for deer and birds and those other filthy nasty things that live in the woods! Open season on everything forever!
You attacked modern human food production while extolling primitive tribalists who adapt themselves to nature as opposed to civilized human modification of the environment to suit man’s needs in the modern world.
Property owners are fed up with you and the rest of the viros seizing other people’s property for your “critical habitat”. The onslaught of the “bird habitat” scam perpetrated by Audubon and DEP caused a major backlash to throw the viros out of power and has slowed their drive for more much more sweeping land use prohibitions in their radical “Beginning with Habitat” agenda. The “gulag concentration camp” line was all your own. Leave other people alone and you won’t have to worry about your victims fighting back in self defense.
“It is analogous to citizens of Bangor having equal standing to citizens of Augusta for matters of Augusta planning and zoning. ”
False. The resources that agencies like LURC are in place to protect are state-owned resources. The waters of the state. Wildlife. Groundwater reserves. These are resources that belong to everyone in the state, and it is entirely appropriate that projects that impact them should be regulated at the state level.
If you cannot understand the impact that individual development can have on these state resources, then you have no business participating in their regulation, and any development you propose should be scrutinized that much more closely. If you can’t understand the concept of cumulative impacts and the fact that resources can be and are impacted cumulatively by different activities in different towns and different counties, then you are not fit to participate in the management of those resources.
LURC is the “Land Use Regulatory Commission”. It is used to preserve other people’s private property against their will. Stop changing the subject. No one opposes preventing pollution of water and you know it. The “earthling” is a radical ideological ecologist which wants control over everything in the name of “water”. We don’t see this kind of sweeping centralized control demanded for land preservation in the cities and suburbs. Viros like the “earthling” want to turn the UT into a Greenline Park.
I am not changing the subject, you are avoiding the issue. It’s the uses on the land that affect the resources that share that land. Timber harvesting affects deer. Road building affects streams and lakes by disturbing soil and increasing stormwater runoff, which carries the soil into the waters and potentially harms fish. Building too close to a lake does the same thing. Building out into the water does the same thing. Too much development too close together and/or too close to a lake does the same thing. Go try to catch a fish in Winnipesaukee. You can’t – the lake is dead. Once you kill a lake, you can’t bring it back.
Again with the park thing. Either link to my comments advocating for the park or shut up about it. And you’re still doing your level best to demonize and dehumanize me by refusing to admit that I’m a person. “The earthling”. I’m an American citizen, just as much as you are, and I have just as much right to be treated with respect. I have resisted the urge to refer to you as “the Muscovite”. I’ll thank you to grant me at least that much courtesy.
The issue you are avoiding is that wilderness preservationism is not what is meant by preventing pollution and nuisance harmful to other property owners. You have no right to seize control of other people’s property for “deer yards”, “bird habitat” or any other kind of “habitat” preservationism in the name of what you call “public values”. If you want a zoo, go buy one yourself and pay for it yourself. Don’t use the force of government to impose it on others.
In this country people are restrained from physically harming others, which does not mean being forced to live for the collective in the form of providing others with alleged “public values” they want, and not as it is interpreted by its self-proclaimed spokesmen.
You would not dare plow into a suburban or urban area and demand to restore eco systems and habitat, yet that is what you want LURC control for against the rural minority in the UT, and you want it from a centralized state bureaucracy with no accountability to the people whose property you want to control. You wouldn’t dare demand to do that to people in southern Maine, either.
You have chosen the “earthling” monicker for yourself, and the symbolism you want in that is telling. You are, despite that, a citizen with the right to free speech. That does not entitle you to respect for the misanthropic, destructive views you have repeatedly espoused in comments. That includes both your statist primitivism and your gratuitous, snide personal attacks against people who reject your viro outlook across numerous comments following articles on Quimby and LURC. Your arrogant ideological ecologism of demanding to control everything because everything is “connected” also does not entitle you to tell anyone he is not “fit” to “participate” in our own government to stop it from attacking our property rights.