Behind all the rhetoric on rural land-use planning is a misunderstanding. At the heart of LD 1798, the LURC reform bill, a law that proposes reform in how we carry out planning and permitting in our Unorganized Territory, is an expansion of the statement of purpose.
For 40 years, the statutory directive to regulators has been “to control … preserve … prevent” on the 10-million acres of private land in Maine’s UT. All these qualities are reaffirmed in LD 1798, and it has simply added such directives as “to support … encourage … honor … conserve.”
For the first time in 40 years, the proposed statutes mentions such concepts as “the rights and participation of property owners” and makes the suggestion that land use planning for the unorganized half of Maine might also “encourage and facilitate regional economic viability.” This is simply reasonable.
The concept of being able to transfer, under the most strict oversight, planning and permitting from a LURC-like entity to oversight by the same statute that oversees organized towns and municipalities is neither radical nor can it ever occur unless ultimately approved by the Legislature itself. This is hardly license.
At a most elemental level, what opponents to LD 1798 seem to want is to preserve rural Maine in formaldehyde as it was back when LURC was first established in 1971 — not back to the Penobscot Nation landscape of 1771, not the open agrarian landscape of 1871, not a dynamic evolving agrarian eco-economy landscape of the future, but just 1971.
And how has this 1971 Luddite philosophy affected people? In 1971, the average family income of Millinocket was about the same as that in Cape Elizabeth. Over the subsequent 40 years, the people of Millinocket and the rural northern Maine woods have had very little to say about their land use plans and have fared poorly. Are not these people, landowners, communities of northern Maine, the true conservationists? Should they not have a say?
LD 1798 simply gives them a little more say about the land they own and love.
This said, alongside “preserving and preventing,” here is what it might mean to “support, encourage, honor and conserve”:
There are growing indicators that northern Maine is posed for revitalization. Recent timber forecasts project significant increases in sustainable biomass over the next 20 years. Pockets of intensive silviculture are demonstrating potential yields three and four times traditional growth rates per acre. The region’s freshwater and mineral resources are world class, near the surface, concentrated and located on private land. Organic and niche farming, expanding maple-sugar operations and new markets for residual woods from chemicals in Old Town to torrefied wood coal in Millinocket illustrate new agricultural and forestry paradigms.
Maine’s eco-economy has potential. Ninety percent of northern Maine remains in private ownership; the speculators and national park extremists are giving way to Maine loggers moving into land ownership and mills and conservationists partnering with working forests. After 40 years of treating northern Maine as the American West — all public lands and public assets — there is a growing recognition that Northern Maine is actually made up of private assets on which we aspire to add public values and public access.
Northern Maine adjoins low-cost hydro and hydrocarbon assets of Canada. Eastport and Sears Island are both 700 miles closer to Europe, Gibraltar and the Middle East than is the port of Savannah, Ga. Seven major rivers all originate in our vast, forested unorganized townships.
Our canoe, hiking, snowmobile, ATV and biking trails constitute outdoor recreation corridors that extend thousands of miles. New Zealand has nothing on our huts and trails; the Rockies can’t compete with our native Maine brook trout; our ocean sailing is the best west of the Aegean.
This extraordinary asset we call Northern Maine is being confronted with an extraordinary opportunity. Reactive land use regulation is being peeled away; world-class ecosystems are being preserved and protected; favorable property tax treatment for commercial forestlands, agriculture, open space and wildlife protection can be counted on. Our deepwater ports are emerging; we are producing natural-resource products at record levels, from pulp and paper to maple sugar and lobsters.
This is the spring to tap our trees.
Bill Beardsley is commissioner of the Maine Department of Conservation.
Come on Bill all you’re doing is preaching to the choir. If you expect folks in the center to be swayed by this discourse you’re sadly mistaken. I’m all in favor of personal property rights but also chilled by the “its my land and I’ll do whatever I want with it” crowd. Here is the first paragraph of LURC’s purpose, it reads like the zoning ordinance found in any organized community… “The Legislature finds that it is desirable to extend principles of sound planning, zoning and subdivision control to the unorganized and deorganized townships of the State: To preserve public health, safety and general welfare; to prevent inappropriate residential, recreational, commercial and industrial uses detrimental to the proper use or value of these areas; to prevent the intermixing of incompatible industrial, commercial, residential and recreational activities; to provide for appropriate residential, recreational, commercial and industrial uses; to prevent the development in these areas of substandard structures or structures located unduly proximate to waters or roads; to prevent the despoliation, pollution and inappropriate use of the water in these areas; and to preserve ecological and natural values.” Just as I don’t buy into everything put forth by the Sierra Club’s I don’t put much credence behind your skewed rant. It once again appears the Lepage administration is attempting to advance far-right policies hailed by a limited number of “dismember gov’t” Mainer’s to the detriment of the majority. Hate to tell you Bill but a good number of folks do believe in conservation but not necessarily preservation. And by the way, Millinocket as an organized town has its own land use regs.
Come on Bill all you’re doing is preaching to the choir. If you expect folks in the center to be swayed by this discourse you’re sadly mistaken. I’m all in favor of personal property rights but also chilled by the “its my land and I’ll do whatever I want with it” crowd.
Here is the first paragraph of LURC’s purpose, it reads like the zoning ordinance found in any organized community…
“The Legislature finds that it is desirable to extend principles of sound planning, zoning and subdivision control to the unorganized and deorganized townships of the State: To preserve public health, safety and general welfare; to prevent inappropriate residential, recreational, commercial and industrial uses detrimental to the proper use or value of these areas; to prevent the intermixing of incompatible industrial, commercial, residential and recreational activities; to provide for appropriate residential, recreational, commercial and industrial uses; to prevent the development in these areas of substandard structures or structures located unduly proximate to waters or roads; to prevent the despoliation, pollution and inappropriate use of the water in these areas; and to preserve ecological and natural values.”
Just as I don’t buy into everything put forth by the Sierra Club’s I don’t put much credence behind your skewed rant.
It once again appears the Lepage administration is attempting to advance far-right policies hailed by a limited number of “dismember gov’t” Mainer’s to the detriment of the majority. Hate to tell you Bill but a good number of folks do believe in conservation but not necessarily preservation.
And by the way, Millinocket as an organized town has its own land use regs.
“Preserving ecological and natural values” and “preventing inappropriate residential, recreational, commercial and
industrial uses detrimental to the proper use or value of these areas” is not normal “zoning”, it is forced preservationism. “Proper use” by whose decree? Of value to whom?
Regardless of the original intent for LURC as a stand-in for the lack of local zoning where there were no organized towns, everyone knows that it has become preservationist agency suppressing normal use of private property by its owners, and that it is intended by the viros to become even more oppressive as illustrated by their various Federal park, Greenline park, preservationist Comprehensive Land Use Plans, and no-build agendas strangling private property owners.
The viro pressure groups hijacked LURC as to impose their own wilderness preservationist ideology from outside the area. That is not the purpose of “zoning”. They want one leash for one neck and are apoplectic over the prospects that they may lose some of their control. The constant attacks on reform as “anarchism” and “dismember government” only show that they are statists unwilling as a matter of principle to allow representative self-government protecting private property rights and accountable to the people governed.
They want to evade the nature of LURC described by Sen. Raye at the beginning of the attempted reform:
“Nowhere else in the United States is there an equivalent of LURC, and I have long questioned the fairness and wisdom of Maine’s approach to planning in the [unorganized territories]. In rural Maine, the acronym LURC is synonymous with heavy-handed government bureaucracy and overreach…. [It] resembles a colonial power able to impose its members will on any given part of the [unorganized territories]… the LURC model is a paternalistic anachronism of a bygone era when those who were running Augusta at the time favored central planning and felt that local government was not up to the challenge of running their own affairs.”
Stop pretending that rejection of colonial oppression means “no government” and “anarchism”.
If all the other states are more to your liking, why not move? I will show you the door.
You have no business telling anyone what state to live in, what the various criteria are, destroying what we have, or “showing anyone the door” — which “showing” you have already done. Rural Maine is in revolt against your oppressive politics. Get out of other people’s lives.
If this works so well, then why are none of the other state’s following our lead???? If one would call it a lead, I do not, Vote to Repeal LURC.
Outstanding editorial and factually, right on the money. LURC was a premier State agency.
He did not say that LURC was or is “a premiere State agency”. He opposes the “directive to regulators ‘to control … preserve … prevent'”. Only the viros think that controlling, preserving and preventing are “premiere”.
Thank-you Bill. You are right on track with this and your assessment of the 1971 Luddite. In the late 60’s and early 70’s a group of folks came to Maine and noticed how friendly and accepting the natives acted.
These Progressive thinkers following the fine example of early explorers approaching the early native populations over the past 400+ years found easy marks. They proceeded to enslave the local population with the modern yokes of slavery: liberty denying and strangling rules and regulations. Of course all of this was accomplished because the poor people of Maine lacked the intellect to know what to do with their own land. Despite sustaining their land for over 150 years at that juncture and despite having substantially more forested land than 100 years previous, they were desperately in need of help from the folks from away with all of their rules. (sarcasm).
The fact is these people from away took advantage of us and we let them do it. People up here are now onto the radical environmental movement’s true goals. Special interests are worried their kingdom is under attack by the peasants. Yes, the extreme environmental movement equals royalty much more than corporate America. At least with the corporates you know what they want.
Dear Eric,
I totally get it. I would be very unhappy if my island were under land use and management control of some entity in Augusta that had no idea who we are, what we are about, what we envision for our children , what we need for our survival..no not mere survival what we need to thrive because thriving is more than getting by..thriving is about a deep personal satisfaction.
We rural Mainers are a very tiny part of Maine’s population. Our voice in the legislature is smaller. The vast majority of Mainers, even folk in Bangor, have no idea how we live , how we earn our livings in cultures that are mostly not about being “employees” or “having jobs” but about self employment, yankee ingenuity, self reliance.
I think the way to have our voices heard and the way to have local self determination not suboridinate to the state or other interests outside of our community is to get beyond the anger and frustration and focus on what it is we want for our communities, what our vision is for ourselves and to secure that for ourselves.
I don’t know where you live Eric, but if LURC’s present zoning and land use plan for the area you and your neighbors are most affected by is intermingled with your community and LURC’s present zoning intereferes with your lives, get together, make your own concept plan..make the LURC come to you, sit with you, walk that land with you and hammer out a vision together that works for you.
Eric, we exert control and influence in our lives not from statutes and regulations but for what we stand for and how we speak. We get what we want not by demanding it or complaining about what is but by setting about building what it is we want. Even if there are no changes in the LURC the counties and townships can demand and achieve much more influence over what happens in the parts of the UT that most affect your lives.
Get together. Co-Envision that together. You don’t need a degree in panning. You don’t need anyone’s permission. Your authority is your common wisdom, your common vision, your common and continued commitment to that vision.They will come. They will listen.
There is no way to “come together” with a centralized bureaucracy that has all the power. You can’t do anything without its “permission”, which it doesn’t grant when it feels its authority challenged, nor should anyone have to go through that. The kind of control the state wields over people in the UT does not belong in this country at all.
But you do know what they want: the land that belongs to someone else and the power of government to take it over. Corporations not in collusion with government don’t have that kind of power.
The big difference between the viro activists and the explorers settling hundreds of years ago is that they are opposites. The settlement and founding of this country was based on rights of the individual, including property rights, where there had been none before. The pressure group activists want to return to pre-American, pre-Enlightenment policy, with themselves in dictatorial control as the “tribal chieftains”.
I don’t know who wrote this for Bearsdley but it’s pretty bad and doesn’t do LePage’s cause a lot of good. The very fact that Beardsley can extol the present day virtues of the UT is in large part as a result of LURC. Without LURC is would have been a lot more like the “wild west” Beardsley decries. Also, Bill, for the record, there was not a whole to of farming and agriculture going on in the UT as you suggest. Finally, it is one thing to convert forestland to agricultural land, which can revert back to forestland as has happened in much of Maine, but quite another thing to convert it to malls, paved roads and second homes. The latter has a much harder time reverting.
People’s homes, businesses and the roads to get to them are not supposed to “revert” and it is not virtuous to coercively prevent them, let alone invoke the standard viro sneer of “second” homes, as if they don’t matter and have no value to the people who own them, whether or not they are actually “second”.
Dear Mr. Beardsley
I fully support you in your call for local self determination. I agree that the State has been very paternalistic in its policy and planning, not just at the LURC, but across the board.
As a planner I have always supported and emphasized the importance of planning from the community up not the top down to preserve and continue culture, traditions, history and heritage. Now that I have returned to Maine after 32 years in NYC I live in a tiny island village and I see the importance of indigenous planning even more clearly and hold that value even more strongly. No one who is not part of the values and traditions we share on this island could possibly do a meaningful plan for us.
In my testimony, I supported counties having the same opt out municipalities do under the current LURC statute..local planning under LURC oversight where there is local planning, zoning and land use planning management. I also advocated for county agency to LURC for all local permitting, inspection and enforcement. And I advicated for LURC to invite and encourage locally generated concept plans . It will be a shame after all this hassle if we don’t at least get that far in LURC reform.
But the real issue is that what you and the counties want is to completely do away with the LURC, to deem the UT all local land under local control. No state with vast wilderness and natural resources territories like the UT has acted so foolishly or unwisely and I hope Maine will never do so either.
Whether declared so by statute or not this is land for Maine’s future.
It’s vast watershed is precious and fragile resource.
Those vast stands of trees and all that water are Maine’s lungs, Maine’s heart. They serve all of Maine, every day not just as some abstract elite concept but in fact, in reality.
This isn’t about tree huggers from away and elitists trying to set policy in your community , it is about having a common stewardship, a common commitment to wise management of these precious natural resources.
Lindsay Newland Bowker, Stonington Maine Planner, Policy Analyst. Mainer born and bred
Vague assertions of “Maine’s future” are meaningless – all land is in someone’s “future”. It also belongs to private property owner’s who have a right to pursue their own future. Almost all land anywhere in Maine or any other state outside of a desert is a “watershed”, which term is irrelevant to the discussion. Poetry about a state’s “lungs” and “heart” add nothing to rational discussion. The so-called “precious” resources are precious to those who own them. They are not “fragile”; the rights of the owners are and have been trampled for too long.
There is no justification for centralized control for which local county government is permitted no more than to serve as an “agent” for a preservationist agency dictating the ends and the rules. The kind of “local” participation you propose has never worked when under a domineering central bureaucracy. Examples are the notorious Greenline Park schemes that the pressure groups have sought under LURC and Federal authority for decades.
Bill Beardsley is right on with his statements, the Enviro’s have infested our state Government and are using LURC as a tool to further there agenda and that is to destroy the economy of Northern Maine and with it depopulate it. LURC must go.
LURC, Land Use Restriction Commission, LURC should only have over site on State Property, not private property, they can regulate Baxter and any other state park, leave land owners alone to make their own choices, its that Freedom of Choice thing again.
Fundamentally, yes. LURC and its purpose are the opposite of government protecting property rights. Rather than protecting us from harm like vandalism, trespass, theft, and pollution the state has become the aggressor.
What is tha one word LURC likes to throw around oh ya it is Primitive Use
Here are some definitions of that word for ya:
Being little evolved from an early ancestral type
Anthropology. Of or relating to a nonindustrial, often tribal culture, especially one that is characterized by a low level of economic complexity: primitive societies.
Sounds just like stuff the serria club wants to push.
Remember that one of their sound bite slogans is to keep the UT in “Darkness”.