EAST MILLINOCKET, Maine — Those supporting a proposed North Woods national park haven’t given up hope of winning a local nonbinding referendum on Monday despite their defeat in a similar straw vote in Medway this week, their spokesman said Friday.
Volunteers for the campaign of leading park proponent Lucas St. Clair will canvas residents by telephone and, weather permitting, door to door over the weekend to rebound from Medway residents’ rejecting their proposal 252-102 in a nonbinding referendum on Tuesday.
“We are working hard, having lots of conversations,” St. Clair spokesman David Farmer said Friday. “We have a long-term persuasion effort going on. Come Tuesday, we are going to get back to the conversations we have been having.”
Ted O’Meara, spokesman for the Maine Woods Coalition, which has taken a leading role in opposing the park, said his side feels buoyed by the Medway win.
“Talking to people up there recently, they felt that [the recent Medway straw vote] would be a tossup because Medway’s selectmen were for the park and East Millinocket was more solidly against it, but you never know,” O’Meara said.
“We think the Medway vote was very convincing, and we’re hoping for the same kind of turnout in East [Millinocket],” O’Meara added.
The poll question being asked to East Millinocket voters Monday is: “Do you support a national park/national recreation east of Baxter State Park as proposed?” Residents can vote at the town office from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m.
The vote will shape whether East Millinocket’s Board of Selectmen endorses the project, Chairman Mark Scally said Friday.
“The board has already said they will go by whatever the turnout happens to be,” Scally said.
Medway’s 354 votes cast represents about 36 percent of the total 987 registered voters — an impressive turnout in a non-Election Day vote, town Administrative Assistant Kathy Lee has said.
Rob Farrington, chairman of the Medway Board of Selectmen, said his board will revisit its endorsement of the park plan when it meets at the town office on Monday.
“I voted to go with the board and support it, but in light of people voting the other way, I would probably go the other way now,” Farrington said.
As proposed by St. Clair, the plan includes a 75,000-acre national park and a 75,000-acre recreation area on land east of Baxter State Park. His proposal follows an earlier, unsuccessful park bid by millionaire entrepreneur Roxanne Quimby, about five years ago.
Park opponents have said they fear a federal park would bring federal authority into Maine, cramp the state’s forest products industries with tighter air-quality restrictions, generate only low-paying jobs and morph into a 3.2-million-acre park plan offered in the 1990s.They also say that the Quimby family owning only about 88,000 acres in the area east of Baxter is a demonstration of how unrealistic St. Clair’s campaign is.
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 existing industries. Opponents question the job estimates.
David Farmer writes a blog on political issues for the Bangor Daily News.