MEDWAY, Maine — A nonbinding referendum on a proposed North Woods national park drew 348 of 987 registered voters to the polls as of 7:30 p.m. Tuesday, officials said.
“That’s a lot, especially for an election like this,” Kathy Lee, town administrative assistant, said. “Normally I could have told you before how many voters had been in [without looking it up]. I can’t do that today.”
The flow of voters into a truck bay at the town fire station at 23 Grindstone Road was steady all day, a vote attendant said. One or two people at a time came in every few minutes to vote on the only issue on the ballot.
Several voters asked about the sometimes contentious park issue outside the fire station spoke on the condition their names not be used. One voter, a man who said he was in his 60s, said he disliked the park proposal. Another much younger man said he supported the park because he didn’t see anything else coming that would boost the Katahdin region’s dormant economy.
“The area is changing,” the younger voter said. “People have to get used to that.”
Lucas St. Clair proposes donating family land 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 businesswoman Roxanne Quimby, offered in 2011.
National park opponents have said they fear it would bring federal authority into Maine, cramp the state’s forest products industries with tighter air-quality restrictions, bring unwanted federal authority into northern Maine, generate only low-paying jobs and morph into a 3.2-million-acre park plan offered in the 1990s. They also say the National Park Service has a huge maintenance backlog with its holdings.
Proponents 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 established industries. They say that parks in several western states work well with surrounding foresters and that national parks have never in the service’s history been anything other than positive economic contributors to communities around them.
The Maine Woods Coalition, an organization that opposes the park, held a press conference last week in which it criticized the pro-park campaign for failing to disclose it owns less than 60 percent of the land where the park would go. The campaign acknowledged an error in one of its acreage estimates but said the amount of land was irrelevant.
The acreage shortfall dismayed the 60-something-year-old voter.
“I think they have been lying,” he said.
The local Board of Selectmen already has endorsed the park proposal, so long as eight conditions it outlined in a March 2 letter to members of the state’s federal delegation are fulfilled. Selectmen said they were only speaking for themselves.
The conditions included that the park be limited to no more than 150,000 acres “and could not be adjusted without an act of Congress”; that existing federal air-quality standards be maintained; and that the National Park Service “be required by law to give preference to Maine-based companies for concession, outfitter and guide contracts and permits.”