EAST MILLINOCKET, Maine — A clerical error has forced town leaders to reschedule a nonbinding vote gauging whether residents support a proposed north woods national park, officials said Friday. The vote will be held Monday, June 29.
The misstatement of a date on a town warrant forced the rescheduling of the referendum from Tuesday, June 23, said Mark Scally, chairman of the town’s Board of Selectmen.
“It is unfortunate. It is a mistake that nobody picked up on and there are like 10 eyes looking at it,” Scally said Friday.
East Millinocket’s town meeting will still occur at 6 p.m. Thursday, June 25, at Schenck High School, where a debate on the national park was held this week. Anyone interested in voting on the park issue at the town meeting can do so by using an absentee ballot, town Administrative Assistant Angela Cote said.
The June 29 referendum will be held from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. at the town office, Cote said.
East Millinocket’s was the first Penobscot County government to schedule a referendum and the third to take on the park question since Feb. 7. The date of Medway’s nonbinding referendum on the park remains Tuesday, June 23, at the Medway Fire Department from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m., town officials said Friday.
Lucas St. Clair proposes donating family lands east of Baxter State Park to create a 75,000-acre national park and a same-sized multi-use recreation area as a gift to the nation. His proposal follows a similar plan his mother, millionaire industrialist Roxanne Quimby, offered in 2011.
That year, East Millinocket residents voted 513-132 against supporting a feasibility study of her proposal.
St. Clair has said a park would generate 400 to 1,000 jobs, be maintained by $40 million in private endowments, diversify a Katahdin region economy devastated by the closure of two paper mills and coexist with existing industries.
Park opponents have said they fear a park would bring federal authority into Maine, cramp the state’s forest products industries, generate only low-paying jobs and morph into a 3.2-million-acre park plan offered in the 1990s. They also express skepticism about the job-creation estimates and the idea that St. Clair’s plan is substantially different from Quimby’s.